, followed.

In the dim light of the dwelling he made out on a couch of bamboos a
woman stretched on her back under a broad sheet of red cotton cloth.
She lay still, as if dead; but her big eyes, wide open, glittered in the
gloom, staring upwards at the slender rafters, motionless and unseeing.
She was in a high fever, and evidently unconscious. Her cheeks were sunk
slightly, her lips were partly open, and on the young face there was the
ominous and fixed expression--the absorbed, contemplating expression of
the unconscious who are going to die. The two men stood looking down at
her in silence.

"Has she been long ill?" asked the traveller.

"I have not slept for five nights," answered the Malay, in a deliberate
tone. "At first she heard voices calling her from the water and
struggled against me who held her. But since the sun of to-day rose she
hears nothing--she hears not me. She sees nothing. She sees not me--me!"

He remained silent for a minute, then asked softly--

"Tuan, will she die?"

"I fear so," said the white man, sorrowfully. He had known Arsat years
ago, in a far country in times of trouble and danger, when no friendship
is to be despised. And since his Malay friend had come unexpectedly to
dwell in the hut on the lagoon with a strange woman, he had slept many
times there, in his journeys up and down the river. He liked the man who
knew how to keep faith in council and how to fight without fear by the
side of his white friend. He liked him--not so much perhaps as a man
likes his favourite dog--but still he liked him well enough to help and
ask no questions, to think sometimes vaguely and hazily in the midst of
his own pursuits, about the lonely man and the long-haired woman with
audacious face and triumphant eyes, who lived together hidden by the
forests--alone and feared.

The white man came out of the hut in time to see the enormous
conflagration of sunset put out by the swift and stealthy shadows that,
rising like a black and impalpable vapour above the tree-tops, spread
over the heaven, extinguishing the crimson glow of floating clouds and
the red brilliance of departing daylight. In a few moments all the stars
came out above the intense blackness of the earth and the great lagoon
gleaming suddenly with reflected lights resembled an oval patch of night
sky flung down into the hopeless and abysmal night of the wilderness.
The white man had some supper out of the basket, then collecting a
few sti