ering grunt of Jorgenson. She raised deliberately the long glass to
her eye, pointing it at the shore.

She distinguished plainly now the colours in the flutter of the
streamers above the brown roofs of the large Settlement, the stir of
palm groves, the black shadows inland and the dazzling white beach of
coral sand all ablaze in its formidable mystery. She swept the whole
range of the view and was going to lower the glass when from behind
the massive angle of the stockade there stepped out into the brilliant
immobility of the landscape a man in a long white gown and with an
enormous black turban surmounting a dark face. Slow and grave he
paced the beach ominously in the sunshine, an enigmatical figure in an
Oriental tale with something weird and menacing in its sudden emergence
and lonely progress.

With an involuntary gasp Mrs. Travers lowered the glass. All at once
behind her back she heard a low musical voice beginning to pour out
incomprehensible words in a tone of passionate pleading. Hassim and
Immada had come on board and had approached Lingard. Yes! It was
intolerable to feel that this flow of soft speech which had no meaning
for her could make its way straight into that man's heart.

PART V. THE POINT OF HONOUR AND THE POINT OF PASSION

I

"May I come in?"

"Yes," said a voice within. "The door is open." It had a wooden latch.
Mr. Travers lifted it while the voice of his wife continued as he
entered. "Did you imagine I had locked myself in? Did you ever know me
lock myself in?"

Mr. Travers closed the door behind him. "No, it has never come to that,"
he said in a tone that was not conciliatory. In that place which was a
room in a wooden hut and had a square opening without glass but with a
half-closed shutter he could not distinguish his wife very well at once.
She was sitting in an armchair and what he could see best was her
fair hair all loose over the back of the chair. There was a moment
of silence. The measured footsteps of two men pacing athwart the
quarter-deck of the dead ship Emma commanded by the derelict shade of
Jorgenson could be heard outside.

Jorgenson, on taking up his dead command, had a house of thin boards
built on the after deck for his own accommodation and that of Lingard
during his flying visits to the Shore of Refuge. A narrow passage
divided it in two and Lingard's side was furnished with a camp bedstead,
a rough desk, and a rattan armchair. On one of his visits Lingard