e harm to
nobody, lived an honest life . . . and a scoundrel like that is born in
Rotterdam or some such place at the other end of the world somewhere,
travels out here, robs his employer, runs away from his wife, and ruins
me and my Nina--he ruined me, I tell you--and gets himself shot at last
by a poor miserable savage, that knows nothing at all about him really.
Where's the sense of all this? Where's your Providence? Where's the good
for anybody in all this? The world's a swindle! A swindle! Why should I
suffer? What have I done to be treated so?"

He howled out his string of questions, and suddenly became silent.
The man who ought to have been a professor made a tremendous effort to
articulate distinctly--

"My dear fellow, don't--don't you see that the ba-bare fac--the fact of
your existence is off--offensive. . . . I--I like you--like . . ."

He fell forward on the table, and ended his remarks by an unexpected and
prolonged snore.

Almayer shrugged his shoulders and walked back to the balustrade.

He drank his own trade gin very seldom, but when he did, a ridiculously
small quantity of the stuff could induce him to assume a rebellious
attitude towards the scheme of the universe. And now, throwing his body
over the rail, he shouted impudently into the night, turning his face
towards that far-off and invisible slab of imported granite upon which
Lingard had thought fit to record God's mercy and Willems' escape.

"Father was wrong--wrong!" he yelled. "I want you to smart for it. You
must smart for it! Where are you, Willems? Hey? . . . Hey? . . . Where
there is no mercy for you--I hope!"

"Hope," repeated in a whispering echo the startled forests, the river
and the hills; and Almayer, who stood waiting, with a smile of tipsy
attention on his lips, heard no other answer.

End of Project Gutenberg's An Outcast of the Islands, by Joseph Conrad

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS ***

***** This file should be named 638.txt or 638.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.org/6/3/638/

Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger

Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States witho