at issue.  This was no stage play; and yet she had caught herself looking at him with bated breath as at a great actor on a darkened stage in some simple and tremendous drama.  He extorted from her a response to the forces that seemed to tear at his single-minded brain, at his guileless breast.  He shook her with his own struggles, he possessed her with his emotions and imposed his personality as if its tragedy were the only thing worth considering in this matter.  And yet what had she to do with all those obscure and barbarous things?  Obviously nothing.  Unluckily she had been taken into the confidence of that man’s passionate perplexity, a confidence provoked apparently by nothing but the power of her personality.  She was flattered, and even more, she was touched by it; she was aware of something that resembled gratitude and provoked a sort of emotional return as between equals who had secretly recognized each other’s value.  Yet at the same time she regretted not having been left in the dark; as much in the dark as Mr. Travers himself or d’Alcacer, though as to the latter it was impossible to say how much precise, unaccountable, intuitive knowledge was buried under his unruffled manner.

D’Alcacer was the sort of man whom it would be much easier to suspect of anything in the world than ignorance—­or stupidity.  Naturally he couldn’t know anything definite or even guess at the bare outline of the facts but somehow he must have scented the situation in those few days of contact with Lingard.  He was an acute and sympathetic observer in all his secret aloofness from the life of men which was so very different from Jorgenson’s secret divorce from the passions of this earth.  Mrs. Travers would have liked to share with d’Alcacer the burden (for it was a burden) of Lingard’s story.  After all, she had not provoked those confidences, neither had that unexpected adventurer from the sea laid on her an obligation of secrecy.  No, not even by implication.  He had never said to her that she was the only person whom he wished to know that story.

No.  What he had said was that she was the only person to whom he could tell the tale himself, as if no one else on earth had the power to draw it from him.  That was the sense and nothing more.  Yes, it would have been a relief to tell d’Alcacer.  It would have been a relief to her feeling of being shut off from the world alone with Lingard as if within the four walls of a romantic palace and in an exotic atmosphere.  Yes, that relief and also another:  that of sharing the responsibility with somebody fit to understand.  Yet she shrank from it, with unaccountable reserve, as if by talking of Lingard with d’Alcacer she was bound to give him an insight into herself.  It was a vague uneasiness and yet so persistent that she felt it, too, when she had to approach and talk to Lingard under d’Alcacer’s eyes.  Not that Mr. d’Alcacer would ever dream of staring or even casting glances.  But was he averting his eyes on purpose?  That would be even more offensive.