“What did he do?” asked Lingard.

“He loved,” said Mrs. Travers, lightly.  “But that’s an old story.”  She raised the glass to her eyes, one arm extended fully to sustain the long tube, and Lingard forgot d’Alcacer in admiring the firmness of her pose and the absolute steadiness of the heavy glass.  She was as firm as a rock after all those emotions and all that fatigue.

Mrs. Travers directed the glass instinctively toward the entrance of the lagoon.  The smooth water there shone like a piece of silver in the dark frame of the forest.  A black speck swept across the field of her vision.  It was some time before she could find it again and then she saw, apparently so near as to be within reach of the voice, a small canoe with two people in it.  She saw the wet paddles rising and dipping with a flash in the sunlight.  She made out plainly the face of Immada, who seemed to be looking straight into the big end of the telescope.  The chief and his sister, after resting under the bank for a couple of hours in the middle of the night, had entered the lagoon and were making straight for the hulk.  They were already near enough to be perfectly distinguishable to the naked eye if there had been anybody on board to glance that way.  But nobody was even thinking of them.  They might not have existed except perhaps in the memory of old Jorgenson.  But that was mostly busy with all the mysterious secrets of his late tomb.

Mrs. Travers lowered the glass suddenly.  Lingard came out from a sort of trance and said: 

“Mr. d’Alcacer.  Loved!  Why shouldn’t he?”

Mrs. Travers looked frankly into Lingard’s gloomy eyes.  “It isn’t that alone, of course,” she said.  “First of all he knew how to love and then. . . .  You don’t know how artificial and barren certain kinds of life can be.  But Mr. d’Alcacer’s life was not that.  His devotion was worth having.”

“You seem to know a lot about him,’” said Lingard, enviously.  “Why do you smile?” She continued to smile at him for a little while.  The long brass tube over her shoulder shone like gold against the pale fairness of her bare head.—­“At a thought,” she answered, preserving the low tone of the conversation into which they had fallen as if their words could have disturbed the self-absorption of Captain H. C. Jorgenson.  “At the thought that for all my long acquaintance with Mr. d’Alcacer I don’t know half as much about him as I know about you.”

“Ah, that’s impossible,” contradicted Lingard.  “Spaniard or no Spaniard, he is one of your kind.”

“Tarred with the same brush,” murmured Mrs. Travers, with only a half-amused irony.  But Lingard continued: 

“He was trying to make it up between me and your husband, wasn’t he?  I was too angry to pay much attention, but I liked him well enough.  What pleased me most was the way in which he gave it up.  That was done like a gentleman.  Do you understand what I mean, Mrs. Travers?”