“Listen to me, Jorgenson.  Things turned out so that before the time came for a fight it was already too late.”  He turned to Mrs. Travers still looking about with anxious eyes and a faint smile on her lips.  “While I was talking to you that evening from the boat it was already too late.  No.  There was never any time for it.  I have told you all about myself, Mrs. Travers, and you know that I speak the truth when I say too late.  If you had only been alone in that yacht going about the seas!”

“Yes,” she struck in, “but I was not alone.”

Lingard dropped his chin on his breast.  Already a foretaste of noonday heat staled the sparkling freshness of the morning.  The smile had vanished from Edith Travers’ lips and her eyes rested on Lingard’s bowed head with an expression no longer curious but which might have appeared enigmatic to Jorgenson if he had looked at her.  But Jorgenson looked at nothing.  He asked from the remoteness of his dead past, “What have you left outside, Tom?  What is there now?”

“There’s the yacht on the shoals, my brig at anchor, and about a hundred of the worst kind of Illanun vagabonds under three chiefs and with two war-praus moored to the edge of the bank.  Maybe Daman is with them, too, out there.”

“No,” said Jorgenson, positively.

“He has come in,” cried Lingard.  “He brought his prisoners in himself then.”

“Landed by torchlight,” uttered precisely the shade of Captain Jorgenson, late of the Barque Wild Rose.  He swung his arm pointing across the lagoon and Mrs. Travers turned about in that direction.

All the scene was but a great light and a great solitude.  Her gaze travelled over the lustrous, dark sheet of empty water to a shore bordered by a white beach empty, too, and showing no sign of human life.  The human habitations were lost in the shade of the fruit trees, masked by the cultivated patches of Indian corn and the banana plantations.  Near the shore the rigid lines of two stockaded forts could be distinguished flanking the beach, and between them with a great open space before it, the brown roof slope of an enormous long building that seemed suspended in the air had a great square flag fluttering above it.  Something like a small white flame in the sky was the carved white coral finial on the gable of the mosque which had caught full the rays of the sun.  A multitude of gay streamers, white and red, flew over the half-concealed roofs, over the brilliant fields and amongst the sombre palm groves.  But it might have been a deserted settlement decorated and abandoned by its departed population.  Lingard pointed to the stockade on the right.

“That’s where your husband is,” he said to Mrs. Travers.

“Who is the other?” uttered Jorgenson’s voice at their backs.  He also was turned that way with his strange sightless gaze fixed beyond them into the void.

“A Spanish gentleman I believe you said, Mrs Travers,” observed Lingard.