en poll
exactly level with the floor of the back veranda. His face meanwhile
preserved an inscrutable immobility. Suddenly he stooped to pick up
the lid of a deal candle-box which was lying on the ground by his foot.
Breaking it up with his fingers, he directed his steps towards the
cook-shed, where, squatting on his heels, he proceeded to kindle a small
fire under a very sooty kettle, possibly to make tea. Wang had some
knowledge of the more superficial rites and ceremonies of white men's
existence, otherwise so enigmatically remote to his mind, and containing
unexpected possibilities of good and evil, which had to be watched for
with prudence and care.

CHAPTER THREE

That morning, as on all the others of the full tale of mornings since
his return with the girl to Samburan, Heyst came out on the veranda and
spread his elbows on the railing, in an easy attitude of proprietorship.
The bulk of the central ridge of the island cut off the bungalow from
sunrises, whether glorious or cloudy, angry or serene. The dwellers
therein were debarred from reading early the fortune of the new-born
day. It sprang upon them in its fulness with a swift retreat of the
great shadow when the sun, clearing the ridge, looked down, hot and dry,
with a devouring glare like the eye of an enemy. But Heyst, once the
Number One of this locality, while it was comparatively teeming with
mankind, appreciated the prolongation of early coolness, the subdued,
lingering half-light, the faint ghost of the departed night, the
fragrance of its dewy, dark soul captured for a moment longer between
the great glow of the sky and the intense blaze of the uncovered sea.

It was naturally difficult for Heyst to keep his mind from dwelling on
the nature and consequences of this, his latest departure from the part
of an unconcerned spectator. Yet he had retained enough of his wrecked
philosophy to prevent him from asking himself consciously how it would
end. But at the same time he could not help being temperamentally, from
long habit and from set purpose, a spectator still, perhaps a little
less naive but (as he discovered with some surprise) not much more far
sighted than the common run of men. Like the rest of us who act, all he
could say to himself, with a somewhat affected grimness, was:

"We shall see!"

This mood of grim doubt intruded on him only when he was alone. There
were not many such moments in his day now; and he did not like them when
t