in a tone of dispassionate surprise the steward whose head appeared in the doorway.  “These are the Captain’s friends.”  “Show me a man’s friends and . . .” began Shaw, dogmatically, but abruptly passed into the tone of admonition.  “You take your mug out of the way, bottle-washer.  They ain’t friends of mine.  I ain’t a vagabond.  I know what’s due to myself.  Quit!” he hissed, fiercely.  Hassim, with an alert movement, grasped the handle of his kris.  Shaw puffed out his cheeks and frowned.—­“Look out!  He will stick you like a prize pig,” murmured Carter without moving a muscle.  Shaw looked round helplessly.—­“And you would enjoy the fun—­wouldn’t you?” he said with slow bitterness.  Carter’s distant non-committal smile quite overwhelmed him by its horrid frigidity.  Extreme despondency replaced the proper feeling of racial pride in the primitive soul of the mate.  “My God!  What luck!  What have I done to fall amongst that lot?” he groaned, sat down, and took his big grey head in his hands.  Carter drew aside to make room for Immada, who, in obedience to a whisper from her brother, sought to leave the cabin.  She passed out after an instant of hesitation, during which she looked up at Carter once.  Her brother, motionless in a defensive attitude, protected her retreat.  She disappeared; Hassim’s grip on his weapon relaxed; he looked in turn at every object in the cabin as if to fix its position in his mind forever, and following his sister, walked out with noiseless footfalls.

They entered the same darkness which had received, enveloped, and hidden the troubled souls of Lingard and Edith, but to these two the light from which they had felt themselves driven away was now like the light of forbidden hopes; it had the awful and tranquil brightness that a light burning on the shore has for an exhausted swimmer about to give himself up to the fateful sea.  They looked back; it had disappeared; Carter had shut the cabin door behind them to have it out with Shaw.  He wanted to arrive at some kind of working compromise with the nominal commander, but the mate was so demoralized by the novelty of the assaults made upon his respectability that the young defender of the brig could get nothing from him except lamentations mingled with mild blasphemies.  The brig slept, and along her quiet deck the voices raised in her cabin—­Shaw’s appeals and reproaches directed vociferously to heaven, together with Carter’s inflexible drawl mingled into one deadened, modulated, and continuous murmur.  The lockouts in the waist, motionless and peering into obscurity, one ear turned to the sea, were aware of that strange resonance like the ghost of a quarrel that seemed to hover at their backs.  Wasub, after seeing Hassim and Immada into their canoe, prowled to and fro the whole length of the vessel vigilantly.  There was not a star in the sky and no gleam on the water; there was no horizon, no outline, no shape for the eye to rest upon, nothing for the hand to grasp.  An obscurity that seemed without limit in space and time had submerged the universe like a destroying flood.