ut making the slightest movement.

Mrs. Travers sighed.

"Yes, it is very hard to think that I who want to touch you cannot make
myself understood as well as they. And yet I speak the language of your
childhood, the language of the man for whom there is no hope but in your
generosity."

He shook his head. She gazed at him anxiously for a moment. "In your
memories then," she said and was surprised by the expression of profound
sadness that over-spread his attentive face.

"Do you know what I remember?" he said. "Do you want to know?" She
listened with slightly parted lips. "I will tell you. Poverty, hard
work--and death," he went on, very quietly. "And now I've told you, and
you don't know. That's how it is between us. You talk to me--I talk to
you--and we don't know."

Her eyelids dropped.

"What can I find to say?" she went on. "What can I do? I mustn't
give in. Think! Amongst your memories there must be some face--some
voice--some name, if nothing more. I can not believe that there is
nothing but bitterness."

"There's no bitterness," he murmured.

"O! Brother, my heart is faint with fear," whispered Immada. Lingard
turned swiftly to that whisper.

"Then, they are to be saved," exclaimed Mrs. Travers. "Ah, I knew. . . ."

"Bear thy fear in patience," said Hassim, rapidly, to his sister.

"They are to be saved. You have said it," Lingard pronounced aloud,
suddenly. He felt like a swimmer who, in the midst of superhuman efforts
to reach the shore, perceives that the undertow is taking him to sea. He
would go with the mysterious current; he would go swiftly--and see the
end, the fulfilment both blissful and terrible.

With this state of exaltation in which he saw himself in some
incomprehensible way always victorious, whatever might befall, there was
mingled a tenacity of purpose. He could not sacrifice his intention,
the intention of years, the intention of his life; he could no more
part with it and exist than he could cut out his heart and live. The
adventurer held fast to his adventure which made him in his own sight
exactly what he was.

He considered the problem with cool audacity, backed by a belief in
his own power. It was not these two men he had to save; he had to save
himself! And looked upon in this way the situation appeared familiar.

Hassim had told him the two white men had been taken by their captors
to Daman's camp. The young Rajah, leaving his sister in the canoe, had
landed on the sa