ispassionate surprise the steward whose head appeared in the doorway.
"These are the Captain's friends." "Show me a man's friends and . . ."
began Shaw, dogmatically, but abruptly passed into the tone of
admonition. "You take your mug out of the way, bottle-washer. They ain't
friends of mine. I ain't a vagabond. I know what's due to myself. Quit!"
he hissed, fiercely. Hassim, with an alert movement, grasped the handle
of his kris. Shaw puffed out his cheeks and frowned.--"Look out! He
will stick you like a prize pig," murmured Carter without moving
a muscle. Shaw looked round helplessly.--"And you would enjoy the
fun--wouldn't you?" he said with slow bitterness. Carter's distant
non-committal smile quite overwhelmed him by its horrid frigidity.
Extreme despondency replaced the proper feeling of racial pride in the
primitive soul of the mate. "My God! What luck! What have I done to fall
amongst that lot?" he groaned, sat down, and took his big grey head in
his hands. Carter drew aside to make room for Immada, who, in obedience
to a whisper from her brother, sought to leave the cabin. She passed
out after an instant of hesitation, during which she looked up at Carter
once. Her brother, motionless in a defensive attitude, protected her
retreat. She disappeared; Hassim's grip on his weapon relaxed; he looked
in turn at every object in the cabin as if to fix its position in
his mind forever, and following his sister, walked out with noiseless
footfalls.

They entered the same darkness which had received, enveloped, and hidden
the troubled souls of Lingard and Edith, but to these two the light from
which they had felt themselves driven away was now like the light of
forbidden hopes; it had the awful and tranquil brightness that a light
burning on the shore has for an exhausted swimmer about to give himself
up to the fateful sea. They looked back; it had disappeared; Carter had
shut the cabin door behind them to have it out with Shaw. He wanted to
arrive at some kind of working compromise with the nominal commander,
but the mate was so demoralized by the novelty of the assaults made upon
his respectability that the young defender of the brig could get nothing
from him except lamentations mingled with mild blasphemies. The brig
slept, and along her quiet deck the voices raised in her cabin--Shaw's
appeals and reproaches directed vociferously to heaven, together with
Carter's inflexible drawl mingled into one deadened, modulated,