“I am stupid,” whispered Mrs. Travers to herself, with a complete and reassuring conviction.  Yet she waited motionless till the footsteps of the two men stopped outside the deckhouse, then separated and died away, before she went out on deck.  She came out on deck some time after her husband.  As if in intended contrast to the conflicts of men a great aspect of serenity lay upon all visible things.  Mr. Travers had gone inside the Cage in which he really looked like a captive and thoroughly out of place.  D’Alcacer had gone in there, too, but he preserved—­or was it an illusion?—­an air of independence.  It was not that he put it on.  Like Mr. Travers he sat in a wicker armchair in very much the same attitude as the other gentleman and also silent; but there was somewhere a subtle difference which did away with the notion of captivity.  Moreover, d’Alcacer had that peculiar gift of never looking out of place in any surroundings.  Mrs. Travers, in order to save her European boots for active service, had been persuaded to use a pair of leather sandals also extracted from that seaman’s chest in the deckhouse.  An additional fastening had been put on them but she could not avoid making a delicate clatter as she walked on the deck.  No part of her costume made her feel so exotic.  It also forced her to alter her usual gait and move with quick, short steps very much like Immada.

“I am robbing the girl of her clothes,” she had thought to herself, “besides other things.”  She knew by this time that a girl of such high rank would never dream of wearing anything that had been worn by somebody else.

At the slight noise of Mrs. Travers’ sandals d’Alcacer looked over the back of his chair.  But he turned his head away at once and Mrs. Travers, leaning her elbow on the rail and resting her head on the palm of her hand, looked across the calm surface of the lagoon, idly.

She was turning her back on the Cage, the fore-part of the deck and the edge of the nearest forest.  That great erection of enormous solid trunks, dark, rugged columns festooned with writhing creepers and steeped in gloom, was so close to the bank that by looking over the side of the ship she could see inverted in the glassy belt of water its massive and black reflection on the reflected sky that gave the impression of a clear blue abyss seen through a transparent film.  And when she raised her eyes the same abysmal immobility seemed to reign over the whole sun-bathed enlargement of that lagoon which was one of the secret places of the earth.  She felt strongly her isolation.  She was so much the only being of her kind moving within this mystery that even to herself she looked like an apparition without rights and without defence and that must end by surrendering to those forces which seemed to her but the expression of the unconscious genius of the place.  Hers was the most complete loneliness, charged with a catastrophic tension.  It lay about her as though she had been set apart within a magic circle.  It cut off—­but it did not protect.  The footsteps that she knew how to distinguish above all others on that deck were heard suddenly behind her.  She did not turn her head.