ell, you must live . . . Unless you
change your mind," he added, as if in involuntary afterthought.

He looked at Willems narrowly, then shook his head.

"You are alone," he went on. "Nothing can help you. Nobody will. You are
neither white nor brown. You have no colour as you have no heart. Your
accomplices have abandoned you to me because I am still somebody to be
reckoned with. You are alone but for that woman there. You say you did
this for her. Well, you have her."

Willems mumbled something, and then suddenly caught his hair with both
his hands and remained standing so. Aissa, who had been looking at him,
turned to Lingard.

"What did you say, Rajah Laut?" she cried.

There was a slight stir amongst the filmy threads of her disordered
hair, the bushes by the river sides trembled, the big tree nodded
precipitately over them with an abrupt rustle, as if waking with a
start from a troubled sleep--and the breath of hot breeze passed, light,
rapid, and scorching, under the clouds that whirled round, unbroken but
undulating, like a restless phantom of a sombre sea.

Lingard looked at her pityingly before he said--

"I have told him that he must live here all his life . . . and with
you."

The sun seemed to have gone out at last like a flickering light away up
beyond the clouds, and in the stifling gloom of the courtyard the three
figures stood colourless and shadowy, as if surrounded by a black and
superheated mist. Aissa looked at Willems, who remained still, as though
he had been changed into stone in the very act of tearing his hair. Then
she turned her head towards Lingard and shouted--

"You lie! You lie! . . . White man. Like you all do. You . . . whom
Abdulla made small. You lie!"

Her words rang out shrill and venomous with her secret scorn, with her
overpowering desire to wound regardless of consequences; in her woman's
reckless desire to cause suffering at any cost, to cause it by the sound
of her own voice--by her own voice, that would carry the poison of her
thought into the hated heart.

Willems let his hands fall, and began to mumble again. Lingard turned
his ear towards him instinctively, caught something that sounded like
"Very well"--then some more mumbling--then a sigh.

"As far as the rest of the world is concerned," said Lingard, after
waiting for awhile in an attentive attitude, "your life is finished.
Nobody will be able to throw any of your villainies in my teeth;
nobody will be abl