husband. As if in intended contrast to the conflicts of men a great
aspect of serenity lay upon all visible things. Mr. Travers had gone
inside the Cage in which he really looked like a captive and thoroughly
out of place. D'Alcacer had gone in there, too, but he preserved--or was
it an illusion?--an air of independence. It was not that he put it
on. Like Mr. Travers he sat in a wicker armchair in very much the same
attitude as the other gentleman and also silent; but there was somewhere
a subtle difference which did away with the notion of captivity.
Moreover, d'Alcacer had that peculiar gift of never looking out of place
in any surroundings. Mrs. Travers, in order to save her European boots
for active service, had been persuaded to use a pair of leather sandals
also extracted from that seaman's chest in the deckhouse. An additional
fastening had been put on them but she could not avoid making a delicate
clatter as she walked on the deck. No part of her costume made her feel
so exotic. It also forced her to alter her usual gait and move with
quick, short steps very much like Immada.

"I am robbing the girl of her clothes," she had thought to herself,
"besides other things." She knew by this time that a girl of such
high rank would never dream of wearing anything that had been worn by
somebody else.

At the slight noise of Mrs. Travers' sandals d'Alcacer looked over the
back of his chair. But he turned his head away at once and Mrs. Travers,
leaning her elbow on the rail and resting her head on the palm of her
hand, looked across the calm surface of the lagoon, idly.

She was turning her back on the Cage, the fore-part of the deck and
the edge of the nearest forest. That great erection of enormous solid
trunks, dark, rugged columns festooned with writhing creepers and
steeped in gloom, was so close to the bank that by looking over the
side of the ship she could see inverted in the glassy belt of water
its massive and black reflection on the reflected sky that gave the
impression of a clear blue abyss seen through a transparent film. And
when she raised her eyes the same abysmal immobility seemed to reign
over the whole sun-bathed enlargement of that lagoon which was one of
the secret places of the earth. She felt strongly her isolation. She was
so much the only being of her kind moving within this mystery that even
to herself she looked like an apparition without rights and without
defence and that must end by surre