revolver," said Willems, in a peremptory tone. He felt an
unwillingness to close with her, to get it by force.

She took no notice and went on--

"Your law . . . or your lies? What am I to believe? I came--I ran to
defend you when I saw the strange men. You lied to me with your lips,
with your eyes. You crooked heart! . . . Ah!" she added, after an abrupt
pause. "She is the first! Am I then to be a slave?"

"You may be what you like," said Willems, brutally. "I am going."

Her gaze was fastened on the blanket under which she had detected a
slight movement. She made a long stride towards it. Willems turned half
round. His legs seemed to him to be made of lead. He felt faint and so
weak that, for a moment, the fear of dying there where he stood, before
he could escape from sin and disaster, passed through his mind in a wave
of despair.

She lifted up one corner of the blanket, and when she saw the sleeping
child a sudden quick shudder shook her as though she had seen something
inexpressibly horrible. She looked at Louis Willems with eyes fixed in
an unbelieving and terrified stare. Then her fingers opened slowly, and
a shadow seemed to settle on her face as if something obscure and fatal
had come between her and the sunshine. She stood looking down, absorbed,
as though she had watched at the bottom of a gloomy abyss the mournful
procession of her thoughts.

Willems did not move. All his faculties were concentrated upon the idea
of his release. And it was only then that the assurance of it came to
him with such force that he seemed to hear a loud voice shouting in the
heavens that all was over, that in another five, ten minutes, he would
step into another existence; that all this, the woman, the madness, the
sin, the regrets, all would go, rush into the past, disappear, become as
dust, as smoke, as drifting clouds--as nothing! Yes! All would vanish in
the unappeasable past which would swallow up all--even the very memory
of his temptation and of his downfall. Nothing mattered. He cared for
nothing. He had forgotten Aissa, his wife, Lingard, Hudig--everybody, in
the rapid vision of his hopeful future.

After a while he heard Aissa saying--

"A child! A child! What have I done to be made to devour this sorrow and
this grief? And while your man-child and the mother lived you told me
there was nothing for you to remember in the land from which you came!
And I thought you could be mine. I thought that I would . . ."