“Great is your power,” he said, in a pleasant voice.  “The white men are going to be delivered to you.”

“Yes, they pass into my keeping,” said Lingard, returning the other’s bright smile but otherwise looking grim enough with the frown which had settled on his forehead at Daman’s approach.  He glanced over his shoulder at a group of spearmen escorting the two captives who had come down the steps from the hut.  At the sight of Daman barring as it were Lingard’s way they had stopped at some distance and had closed round the two white men.  Daman also glanced dispassionately that way.

“They were my guests,” he murmured.  “Please God I shall come soon to ask you for them . . . as a friend,” he added after a slight pause.

“And please God you will not go away empty handed,” said Lingard, smoothing his brow.  “After all you and I were not meant to meet only to quarrel.  Would you have preferred to see them pass into Tengga’s keeping?”

“Tengga is fat and full of wiles,” said Daman, disdainfully, “a mere shopkeeper smitten by a desire to be a chief.  He is nothing.  But you and I are men that have real power.  Yet there is a truth that you and I can confess to each other.  Men’s hearts grow quickly discontented.  Listen.  The leaders of men are carried forward in the hands of their followers; and common men’s minds are unsteady, their desires changeable, and their thoughts not to be trusted.  You are a great chief they say.  Do not forget that I am a chief, too, and a leader of armed men.”

“I have heard of you, too,” said Lingard in a composed voice.

Daman had cast his eyes down.  Suddenly he opened them very wide with an effect that startled Mrs. Travers.—­“Yes.  But do you see?” Mrs. Travers, her hand resting lightly on Lingard’s arm, had the sensation of acting in a gorgeously got up play on the brilliantly lighted stage of an exotic opera whose accompaniment was not music but the varied strains of the all-pervading silence.—­“Yes, I see,” Lingard replied with a surprisingly confidential intonation.  “But power, too, is in the hands of a great leader.”

Mrs. Travers watched the faint movements of Daman’s nostrils as though the man were suffering from some powerful emotion, while under her fingers Lingard’s forearm in its white sleeve was as steady as a limb of marble.  Without looking at him she seemed to feel that with one movement he could crush that nervous figure in which lived the breath of the great desert haunted by his nomad, camel-riding ancestors.—­“Power is in the hand of God,” he said, all animation dying out of his face, and paused to wait for Lingard’s “Very true,” then continued with a fine smile, “but He apportions it according to His will for His own purposes, even to those that are not of the Faith.”

“Such being the will of God you should harbour no bitterness against them in your heart.”