wake me up would have awakened you, too. I tried to be as quiet as I
could. What roused you?"

"I don't know--a dream, perhaps. I woke up crying."

"What was the dream?"

Heyst, with one hand resting on the table, had turned in her direction,
his round, uncovered head set on a fighter's muscular neck. She left his
question unanswered, as if she had not heard it.

"What is it you have missed?" she asked in her turn, very grave.

Her dark hair, drawn smoothly back, was done in two thick tresses for
the night. Heyst noticed the good form of her brow, the dignity of its
width, its unshining whiteness. It was a sculptural forehead. He had a
moment of acute appreciation intruding upon another order of thoughts.
It was as if there could be no end of his discoveries about that girl,
at the most incongruous moments.

She had on nothing but a hand-woven cotton sarong--one of Heyst's few
purchases, years ago, in Celebes, where they are made. He had forgotten
all about it till she came, and then had found it at the bottom of an
old sandalwood trunk dating back to pre-Morrison days. She had quickly
learned to wind it up under her armpits with a safe twist, as Malay
village girls do when going down to bathe in a river. Her shoulders and
arms were bare; one of her tresses, hanging forward, looked almost black
against the white skin. As she was taller than the average Malay woman,
the sarong ended a good way above her ankles. She stood poised firmly,
half-way between the table and the curtained doorway, the insteps of her
bare feet gleaming like marble on the overshadowed matting of the floor.
The fall of her lighted shoulders, the strong and fine modelling of
her arms hanging down her sides, her immobility, too, had something
statuesque, the charm of art tense with life. She was not very
big--Heyst used to think of her, at first, as "that poor little
girl,"--but revealed free from the shabby banality of a white platform
dress, in the simple drapery of the sarong, there was that in her form
and in the proportions of her body which suggested a reduction from a
heroic size.

She moved forward a step.

"What is it you have missed?" she asked again.

Heyst turned his back altogether on the table. The black spokes of
darkness over the floor and the walls, joining up on the ceiling in a
path of shadow, were like the bars of a cage about them. It was his turn
to ignore a question.

"You woke up in a fright, you say?" he said.