“I quite understand.”

“Yes, you would,” he commented, simply.  “But just then I was too angry to talk to anybody.  And so I cleared out on board my own ship and stayed there, not knowing what to do and wishing you all at the bottom of the sea.  Don’t mistake me, Mrs. Travers; it’s you, the people aft, that I wished at the bottom of the sea.  I had nothing against the poor devils on board, They would have trusted me quick enough.  So I fumed there till—­till. . . .”

“Till nine o’clock or a little after,” suggested Mrs. Travers, impenetrably.

“No.  Till I remembered you,” said Lingard with the utmost innocence.

“Do you mean to say that you forgot my existence so completely till then?  You had spoken to me on board the yacht, you know.”

“Did I?  I thought I did.  What did I say?”

“You told me not to touch a dusky princess,” answered Mrs. Travers with a short laugh.  Then with a visible change of mood as if she had suddenly out of a light heart been recalled to the sense of the true situation:  “But indeed I meant no harm to this figure of your dream.  And, look over there.  She is pursuing you.”  Lingard glanced toward the north shore and suppressed an exclamation of remorse.  For the second time he discovered that he had forgotten the existence of Hassim and Immada.  The canoe was now near enough for its occupants to distinguish plainly the heads of three people above the low bulwark of the Emma.  Immada let her paddle trail suddenly in the water, with the exclamation, “I see the white woman there.”  Her brother looked over his shoulder and the canoe floated, arrested as if by the sudden power of a spell.—­“They are no dream to me,” muttered Lingard, sturdily.  Mrs. Travers turned abruptly away to look at the further shore.  It was still and empty to the naked eye and seemed to quiver in the sunshine like an immense painted curtain lowered upon the unknown.

“Here’s Rajah Hassim coming, Jorgenson.  I had an idea he would perhaps stay outside.”  Mrs. Travers heard Lingard’s voice at her back and the answering grunt of Jorgenson.  She raised deliberately the long glass to her eye, pointing it at the shore.

She distinguished plainly now the colours in the flutter of the streamers above the brown roofs of the large Settlement, the stir of palm groves, the black shadows inland and the dazzling white beach of coral sand all ablaze in its formidable mystery.  She swept the whole range of the view and was going to lower the glass when from behind the massive angle of the stockade there stepped out into the brilliant immobility of the landscape a man in a long white gown and with an enormous black turban surmounting a dark face.  Slow and grave he paced the beach ominously in the sunshine, an enigmatical figure in an Oriental tale with something weird and menacing in its sudden emergence and lonely progress.

With an involuntary gasp Mrs. Travers lowered the glass.  All at once behind her back she heard a low musical voice beginning to pour out incomprehensible words in a tone of passionate pleading.  Hassim and Immada had come on board and had approached Lingard.  Yes!  It was intolerable to feel that this flow of soft speech which had no meaning for her could make its way straight into that man’s heart.