they are spoken
in such a voice? In that voice which did not seem to be his voice--his
voice when he spoke by the brook, when he was never angry and always
smiling! Her eyes were fixed upon the dark doorway, but her hands
strayed mechanically upwards; she took up all her hair, and, inclining
her head slightly over her shoulder, wrung out the long black tresses,
twisting them persistently, while she stood, sad and absorbed, like one
listening to an inward voice--the voice of bitter, of unavailing
regret. The thunder had ceased, the wind had died out, and the rain fell
perpendicular and steady through a great pale clearness--the light of
remote sun coming victorious from amongst the dissolving blackness of
the clouds. She stood near the doorway. He was there--alone in the gloom
of the dwelling. He was there. He spoke not. What was in his mind now?
What fear? What desire? Not the desire of her as in the days when he
used to smile . . . How could she know? . . .

A sigh coming from the bottom of her heart, flew out into the world
through her parted lips. A sigh faint, profound, and broken; a sigh
full of pain and fear, like the sigh of those who are about to face the
unknown: to face it in loneliness, in doubt, and without hope. She let
go her hair, that fell scattered over her shoulders like a funeral veil,
and she sank down suddenly by the door. Her hands clasped her ankles;
she rested her head on her drawn-up knees, and remained still, very
still, under the streaming mourning of her hair. She was thinking of
him; of the days by the brook; she was thinking of all that had been
their love--and she sat in the abandoned posture of those who sit
weeping by the dead, of those who watch and mourn over a corpse.

PART V

CHAPTER ONE

Almayer propped, alone on the verandah of his house, with both his
elbows on the table, and holding his head between his hands, stared
before him, away over the stretch of sprouting young grass in his
courtyard, and over the short jetty with its cluster of small canoes,
amongst which his big whale-boat floated high, like a white mother
of all that dark and aquatic brood. He stared on the river, past the
schooner anchored in mid-stream, past the forests of the left bank; he
stared through and past the illusion of the material world.

The sun was sinking. Under the sky was stretched a network of white
threads, a network fine and close-meshed, where here and there were
caught thicker whi