“I am not stiff in the least,” she interrupted, still smiling.  “I am really a very strong woman,” she added, earnestly.  “Whatever happens you may reckon on that fact.”

Lingard gave her an admiring glance.  But the shade of Jorgenson, perhaps catching in its remoteness the sound of the word woman, was suddenly moved to begin scolding with all the liberty of a ghost, in a flow of passionless indignation.

“Woman!  That’s what I say.  That’s just about the last touch—­that you, Tom Lingard, red-eyed Tom, King Tom, and all those fine names, that you should leave your weapons twenty miles behind you, your men, your guns, your brig that is your strength, and come along here with your mouth full of fight, bare-handed and with a woman in tow.—­Well—­well!”

“Don’t forget, Jorgenson, that the lady hears you,” remonstrated Lingard in a vexed tone. . . .  “He doesn’t mean to be rude,” he remarked to Mrs. Travers quite loud, as if indeed Jorgenson were but an immaterial and feelingless illusion.  “He has forgotten.”

“The woman is not in the least offended.  I ask for nothing better than to be taken on that footing.”

“Forgot nothing!” mumbled Jorgenson with a sort of ghostly assertiveness and as it were for his own satisfaction.  “What’s the world coming to?”

“It was I who insisted on coming with Captain Lingard,” said Mrs. Travers, treating Jorgenson to a fascinating sweetness of tone.

“That’s what I say!  What is the world coming to?  Hasn’t King Tom a mind of his own?  What has come over him?  He’s mad!  Leaving his brig with a hundred and twenty born and bred pirates of the worst kind in two praus on the other side of a sandbank.  Did you insist on that, too?  Has he put himself in the hands of a strange woman?”

Jorgenson seemed to be asking those questions of himself.  Mrs. Travers observed the empty stare, the self-communing voice, his unearthly lack of animation.  Somehow it made it very easy to speak the whole truth to him.

“No,” she said, “it is I who am altogether in his hands.”

Nobody would have guessed that Jorgenson had heard a single word of that emphatic declaration if he had not addressed himself to Lingard with the question neither more nor less abstracted than all his other speeches.

“Why then did you bring her along?”

“You don’t understand.  It was only right and proper.  One of the gentlemen is the lady’s husband.”

“Oh, yes,” muttered Jorgenson.  “Who’s the other?”

“You have been told.  A friend.”

“Poor Mr. d’Alcacer,” said Mrs. Travers.  “What bad luck for him to have accepted our invitation.  But he is really a mere acquaintance.”

“I hardly noticed him,” observed Lingard, gloomily.  “He was talking to you over the back of your chair when I came aboard the yacht as if he had been a very good friend.”

“We always understood each other very well,” said Mrs. Travers, picking up from the rail the long glass that was lying there.  “I always liked him, the frankness of his mind, and his great loyalty.”