at all what Don Martin thinks him to
be. For the rest--mysterious to me. He is _your_ countryman after all--"

She seemed quite surprised by that view.

"Yes," she said, slowly. "But you know, I can not--what shall I
say?--imagine him at all. He has nothing in common with the mankind I
know. There is nothing to begin upon. How does such a man live? What are
his thoughts? His actions? His affections? His--"

"His conventions," suggested d'Alcacer. "That would include everything."

Mr. Travers appeared suddenly behind them with a glowing cigar in
his teeth. He took it between his fingers to declare with persistent
acrimony that no amount of "scoundrelly intimidation" would prevent him
from having his usual walk. There was about three hundred yards to the
southward of the yacht a sandbank nearly a mile long, gleaming a silvery
white in the darkness, plumetted in the centre with a thicket of dry
bushes that rustled very loud in the slightest stir of the heavy night
air. The day after the stranding they had landed on it "to stretch their
legs a bit," as the sailing-master defined it, and every evening since,
as if exercising a privilege or performing a duty, the three paced there
for an hour backward and forward lost in dusky immensity, threading at
the edge of water the belt of damp sand, smooth, level, elastic to the
touch like living flesh and sweating a little under the pressure of
their feet.

This time d'Alcacer alone followed Mr. Travers. Mrs. Travers heard them
get into the yacht's smallest boat, and the night-watchman, tugging at
a pair of sculls, pulled them off to the nearest point. Then the man
returned. He came up the ladder and she heard him say to someone on
deck:

"Orders to go back in an hour."

His footsteps died out forward, and a somnolent, unbreathing repose took
possession of the stranded yacht.

VI

After a time this absolute silence which she almost could feel pressing
upon her on all sides induced in Mrs. Travers a state of hallucination.
She saw herself standing alone, at the end of time, on the brink of
days. All was unmoving as if the dawn would never come, the stars would
never fade, the sun would never rise any more; all was mute, still,
dead--as if the shadow of the outer darkness, the shadow of the
uninterrupted, of the everlasting night that fills the universe, the
shadow of the night so profound and so vast that the blazing suns lost
in it are only like sparks, like pin-points