ed," said Willems, contemptuously.

"You took good care that I should not hang round your neck after we
were," she answered, clenching her hands, and putting her face close to
his. "You boasted while I suffered and said nothing. What has become of
your greatness; of our greatness--you were always speaking about? Now
I am going to live on the charity of your master. Yes. That is true. He
sent Leonard to tell me so. And you will go and boast somewhere else,
and starve. So! Ah! I can breathe now! This house is mine."

"Enough!" said Willems, slowly, with an arresting gesture.

She leaped back, the fright again in her eyes, snatched up the child,
pressed it to her breast, and, falling into a chair, drummed insanely
with her heels on the resounding floor of the verandah.

"I shall go," said Willems, steadily. "I thank you. For the first time
in your life you make me happy. You were a stone round my neck; you
understand. I did not mean to tell you that as long as you lived, but
you made me--now. Before I pass this gate you shall be gone from my
mind. You made it very easy. I thank you."

He turned and went down the steps without giving her a glance, while she
sat upright and quiet, with wide-open eyes, the child crying querulously
in her arms. At the gate he came suddenly upon Leonard, who had been
dodging about there and failed to get out of the way in time.

"Do not be brutal, Mr. Willems," said Leonard, hurriedly. "It is
unbecoming between white men with all those natives looking on."
Leonard's legs trembled very much, and his voice wavered between high
and low tones without any attempt at control on his part. "Restrain your
improper violence," he went on mumbling rapidly. "I am a respectable man
of very good family, while you . . . it is regrettable . . . they all
say so . . ."

"What?" thundered Willems. He felt a sudden impulse of mad anger, and
before he knew what had happened he was looking at Leonard da Souza
rolling in the dust at his feet. He stepped over his prostrate
brother-in-law and tore blindly down the street, everybody making way
for the frantic white man.

When he came to himself he was beyond the outskirts of the town,
stumbling on the hard and cracked earth of reaped rice fields. How did
he get there? It was dark. He must get back. As he walked towards the
town slowly, his mind reviewed the events of the day and he felt a sense
of bitter loneliness. His wife had turned him out of his own house.