b. He had made out enough of this
story from the old serang's pidgin English to know that the Captain's
native friends, one of them a woman, had perished in a mysterious
catastrophe. But the why of it, and how it came about, remained still
quite incomprehensible to him. Of course, a man like the Captain would
feel terribly cut up. . . .

"You will be soon yourself again, sir," he said in the kindest possible
tone.

With the same simplicity Lingard shook his head. He was thinking of the
dead Jaffir with his last message delivered and untroubled now by all
these matters of the earth. He had been ordered to tell him to forget
everything. Lingard had an inward shudder. In the dismay of his heart he
might have believed his brig to lie under the very wing of the Angel of
Desolation--so oppressive, so final, and hopeless seemed the silence in
which he and Carter looked at each other, wistfully.

Lingard reached for a sheet of paper amongst several lying on the table,
took up a pen, hesitated a moment, and then wrote:

"Meet me at day-break on the sandbank."

He addressed the envelope to Mrs. Travers, Yacht Hermit, and pushed it
across the table.

"Send this on board the schooner at once, Mr. Carter. Wait a moment.
When our boats shove off for the sandbank have the forecastle gun fired.
I want to know when that dead man has left the ship."

He sat alone, leaning his head on his hand, listening, listening
endlessly, for the report of the gun. Would it never come? When it came
at last muffled, distant, with a slight shock through the body of the
brig he remained still with his head leaning on his hand but with a
distinct conviction, with an almost physical certitude, that under the
cotton sheet shrouding the dead man something of himself, too, had left
the ship.

IX

In a roomy cabin, furnished and fitted with austere comfort, Mr. Travers
reposed at ease in a low bed-place under a snowy white sheet and a light
silk coverlet, his head sunk in a white pillow of extreme purity. A
faint scent of lavender hung about the fresh linen. Though lying on his
back like a person who is seriously ill Mr. Travers was conscious
of nothing worse than a great fatigue. Mr. Travers' restfulness had
something faintly triumphant in it. To find himself again on board
his yacht had soothed his vanity and had revived his sense of his own
importance. He contemplated it in a distant perspective, restored to its
proper surroundings and unaff