tter go
to the hut? Don Martin ought to have someone with him when he wakes up."
Mrs. Travers remained perfectly still and even now and then held her
breath with a vague fear of hearing those footsteps wandering in the
dark. D'Alcacer had disappeared. Again Mrs. Travers held her breath. No.
Nothing. Not a sound. Only the night to her eyes seemed to have grown
darker. Was that a footstep? "Where could I hide myself?" she thought.
But she didn't move.

After leaving d'Alcacer, Lingard threading his way between the fires
found himself under the big tree, the same tree against which Daman had
been leaning on the day of the great talk when the white prisoners had
been surrendered to Lingard's keeping on definite conditions. Lingard
passed through the deep obscurity made by the outspread boughs of the
only witness left there of a past that for endless ages had seen no
mankind on this shore defended by the Shallows, around this lagoon
overshadowed by the jungle. In the calm night the old giant, without
shudders or murmurs in its enormous limbs, saw the restless man drift
through the black shade into the starlight.

In that distant part of the courtyard there were only a few sentries
who, themselves invisible, saw Lingard's white figure pace to and fro
endlessly. They knew well who that was. It was the great white man. A
very great man. A very rich man. A possessor of fire-arms, who could
dispense valuable gifts and deal deadly blows, the friend of their
Ruler, the enemy of his enemies, known to them for years and always
mysterious. At their posts, flattened against the stakes near convenient
loopholes, they cast backward glances and exchanged faint whispers from
time to time.

Lingard might have thought himself alone. He had lost touch with the
world. What he had said to d'Alcacer was perfectly true. He had no
thought. He was in the state of a man who, having cast his eyes through
the open gates of Paradise, is rendered insensible by that moment's
vision to all the forms and matters of the earth; and in the extremity
of his emotion ceases even to look upon himself but as the subject of
a sublime experience which exalts or unfits, sanctifies or damns--he
didn't know which. Every shadowy thought, every passing sensation was
like a base intrusion on that supreme memory. He couldn't bear it.

When he had tried to resume his conversation with Belarab after Mrs.
Travers' arrival he had discovered himself unable to go on. He had