all the shots I will follow.  I am a great runner, and before they can come up we shall be gone.  I will hold out as long as I can, for she is but a woman—­that can neither run nor fight, but she has your heart in her weak hands.’  He dropped behind the canoe.  The prau was coming.  She and I ran, and as we rushed along the path I heard shots.  My brother fired—­once—­twice—­and the booming of the gong ceased.  There was silence behind us.  That neck of land is narrow.  Before I heard my brother fire the third shot I saw the shelving shore, and I saw the water again; the mouth of a broad river.  We crossed a grassy glade.  We ran down to the water.  I saw a low hut above the black mud, and a small canoe hauled up.  I heard another shot behind me.  I thought, ’That is his last charge.’  We rushed down to the canoe; a man came running from the hut, but I leaped on him, and we rolled together in the mud.  Then I got up, and he lay still at my feet.  I don’t know whether I had killed him or not.  I and Diamelen pushed the canoe afloat.  I heard yells behind me, and I saw my brother run across the glade.  Many men were bounding after him, I took her in my arms and threw her into the boat, then leaped in myself.  When I looked back I saw that my brother had fallen.  He fell and was up again, but the men were closing round him.  He shouted, ’I am coming!’ The men were close to him.  I looked.  Many men.  Then I looked at her.  Tuan, I pushed the canoe!  I pushed it into deep water.  She was kneeling forward looking at me, and I said, ‘Take your paddle,’ while I struck the water with mine.  Tuan, I heard him cry.  I heard him cry my name twice; and I heard voices shouting, ‘Kill!  Strike!’ I never turned back.  I heard him calling my name again with a great shriek, as when life is going out together with the voice—­and I never turned my head.  My own name! . . .  My brother!  Three times he called—­but I was not afraid of life.  Was she not there in that canoe?  And could I not with her find a country where death is forgotten—­where death is unknown!”

The white man sat up.  Arsat rose and stood, an indistinct and silent figure above the dying embers of the fire.  Over the lagoon a mist drifting and low had crept, erasing slowly the glittering images of the stars.  And now a great expanse of white vapour covered the land:  it flowed cold and gray in the darkness, eddied in noiseless whirls round the tree-trunks and about the platform of the house, which seemed to float upon a restless and impalpable illusion of a sea.  Only far away the tops of the trees stood outlined on the twinkle of heaven, like a sombre and forbidding shore—­a coast deceptive, pitiless and black.

Arsat’s voice vibrated loudly in the profound peace.

“I had her there!  I had her!  To get her I would have faced all mankind.  But I had her—­and—­”

His words went out ringing into the empty distances.  He paused, and seemed to listen to them dying away very far—­beyond help and beyond recall.  Then he said quietly—­