this charmingly simple problem?"

"I am sorry," she murmured.

"And so am I," he confessed quickly. "And the bitterest of this
humiliation is its complete uselessness--which I feel, I feel!"

She had never before seen him give such signs of feeling. Across his
ghastly face the long moustaches flamed in the shade. He spoke suddenly:

"I wonder if I could find enough courage to creep among them in the
night, with a knife, and cut their throats one after another, as they
slept! I wonder--"

She was frightened by his unwonted appearance more than by the words in
his mouth, and said earnestly:

"Don't you try to do such a thing! Don't you think of it!"

"I don't possess anything bigger than a penknife. As to thinking of it,
Lena, there's no saying what one may think of. I don't think. Something
in me thinks--something foreign to my nature. What is the matter?"

He noticed her parted lips, and the peculiar stare in her eyes, which
had wandered from his face.

"There's somebody after us. I saw something white moving," she cried.

Heyst did not turn his head; he only glanced at her out-stretched arm.

"No doubt we are followed; we are watched."

"I don't see anything now," she said.

"And it does not matter," Heyst went on in his ordinary voice. "Here we
are in the forest. I have neither strength nor persuasion. Indeed, it's
extremely difficult to be eloquent before a Chinaman's head stuck at
one out of a lot of brushwood. But can we wander among these big trees
indefinitely? Is this a refuge? No! What else is left to us? I did think
for a moment of the mine; but even there we could not remain very long.
And then that gallery is not safe. The props were too weak to begin
with. Ants have been at work there--ants after the men. A death-trap, at
best. One can die but once, but there are many manners of death."

The girl glanced about fearfully, in search of the watcher or follower
whom she had glimpsed once among the trees; but if he existed, he had
concealed himself. Nothing met her eyes but the deepening shadows of the
short vistas between the living columns of the still roof of leaves.
She looked at the man beside her expectantly, tenderly, with suppressed
affright and a sort of awed wonder.

"I have also thought of these people's boat," Heyst went on. "We could
get into that, and--only they have taken everything out of her. I have
seen her oars and mast in a corner of their room. To shove off in an
empty boat