She had listened tense and very attentive, almost stern.  And it was without the slightest change of expression that she said: 

“I think that you bore yourself appropriately to the state of life to which it has pleased God to call you.”

“What state?” muttered Lingard to himself.  “I am what I am.  They call me Rajah Laut, King Tom, and such like.  I think it amused you to hear it, but I can tell you it is no joke to have such names fastened on one, even in fun.  And those very names have in them something which makes all this affair here no small matter to anybody.”

She stood before him with a set, severe face.—­“Did you call me out in this alarming manner only to quarrel with me?”—­“No, but why do you choose this time to tell me that my coming for help to you was nothing but impudence in your sight?  Well, I beg your pardon for intruding on your dignity.”—­“You misunderstood me,” said Mrs. Travers, without relaxing for a moment her contemplative severity.  “Such a flattering thing had never happened to me before and it will never happen to me again.  But believe me, King Tom, you did me too much honour.  Jorgenson is perfectly right in being angry with you for having taken a woman in tow.”—­“He didn’t mean to be rude,” protested Lingard, earnestly.  Mrs. Travers didn’t even smile at this intrusion of a point of manners into the atmosphere of anguish and suspense that seemed always to arise between her and this man who, sitting on the sea-chest, had raised his eyes to her with an air of extreme candour and seemed unable to take them off again.  She continued to look at him sternly by a tremendous effort of will.

“How changed you are,” he murmured.

He was lost in the depths of the simplest wonder.  She appeared to him vengeful and as if turned forever into stone before his bewildered remorse.  Forever.  Suddenly Mrs. Travers looked round and sat down in the chair.  Her strength failed her but she remained austere with her hands resting on the arms of her seat.  Lingard sighed deeply and dropped his eyes.  She did not dare relax her muscles for fear of breaking down altogether and betraying a reckless impulse which lurked at the bottom of her dismay, to seize the head of d’Alcacer’s Man of Fate, press it to her breast once, fling it far away, and vanish herself, vanish out of life like a wraith.  The Man of Fate sat silent and bowed, yet with a suggestion of strength in his dejection.  “If I don’t speak,” Mrs. Travers said to herself, with great inward calmness, “I shall burst into tears.”  She said aloud, “What could have happened?  What have you dragged me in here for?  Why don’t you tell me your news?”

“I thought you didn’t want to hear.  I believe you really don’t want to.  What is all this to you?  I believe that you don’t care anything about what I feel, about what I do and how I end.  I verily believe that you don’t care how you end yourself.  I believe you never cared for your own or anybody’s feelings.  I don’t think it is because you are hard, I think it is because you don’t know, and don’t want to know, and are angry with life.”