e it away
till the boat is here."

"No, Mr. Hudig."

"And don't forget about these opium cases. It's for to-night. Use my own
boatmen. Transship them from the Caroline to the Arab barque," went
on the master in his hoarse undertone. "And don't you come to me with
another story of a case dropped overboard like last time," he added,
with sudden ferocity, looking up at his confidential clerk.

"No, Mr. Hudig. I will take care."

"That's all. Tell that pig as you go out that if he doesn't make the
punkah go a little better I will break every bone in his body," finished
up Hudig, wiping his purple face with a red silk handkerchief nearly as
big as a counterpane.

Noiselessly Willems went out, shutting carefully behind him the little
green door through which he passed to the warehouse. Hudig, pen in hand,
listened to him bullying the punkah boy with profane violence, born
of unbounded zeal for the master's comfort, before he returned to his
writing amid the rustling of papers fluttering in the wind sent down by
the punkah that waved in wide sweeps above his head.

Willems would nod familiarly to Mr. Vinck, who had his desk close to the
little door of the private office, and march down the warehouse with an
important air. Mr. Vinck--extreme dislike lurking in every wrinkle of
his gentlemanly countenance--would follow with his eyes the white figure
flitting in the gloom amongst the piles of bales and cases till it
passed out through the big archway into the glare of the street.

CHAPTER THREE

The opportunity and the temptation were too much for Willems, and under
the pressure of sudden necessity he abused that trust which was his
pride, the perpetual sign of his cleverness and a load too heavy for him
to carry. A run of bad luck at cards, the failure of a small speculation
undertaken on his own account, an unexpected demand for money from one
or another member of the Da Souza family--and almost before he was well
aware of it he was off the path of his peculiar honesty. It was such a
faint and ill-defined track that it took him some time to find out how
far he had strayed amongst the brambles of the dangerous wilderness he
had been skirting for so many years, without any other guide than his
own convenience and that doctrine of success which he had found for
himself in the book of life--in those interesting chapters that the
Devil has been permitted to write in it, to test the sharpness of men's
eyesight and the