“Was it Tom you were after?” said Jorgenson in the tone of a negligent remark.

“Can’t you answer me?” she cried, angrily.

“Tom was busy.  No child’s play.  The boat shoved off,” said Jorgenson, as if he were merely thinking aloud.

“You won’t tell me, then?” Mrs. Travers apostrophized him, fearlessly.  She was not afraid of Jorgenson.  Just then she was afraid of nothing and nobody.  And Jorgenson went on thinking aloud.

“I guess he will be kept busy from now on and so shall I.”

Mrs. Travers seemed ready to take by the shoulders and shake that dead-voiced spectre till it begged for mercy.  But suddenly her strong white arms fell down by her side, the arms of an exhausted woman.

“I shall never, never find out,” she whispered to herself.

She cast down her eyes in intolerable humiliation, in intolerable desire, as though she had veiled her face.  Not a sound reached the loneliness of her thought.  But when she raised her eyes again Jorgenson was no longer standing before her.

For an instant she saw him all black in the brilliant and narrow doorway, and the next moment he had vanished outside, as if devoured by the hot blaze of light.  The sun had risen on the Shore of Refuge.

When Mrs. Travers came out on deck herself it was as it were with a boldly unveiled face, with wide-open and dry, sleepless eyes.  Their gaze, undismayed by the sunshine, sought the innermost heart of things each day offered to the passion of her dread and of her impatience.  The lagoon, the beach, the colours and the shapes struck her more than ever as a luminous painting on an immense cloth hiding the movements of an inexplicable life.  She shaded her eyes with her hand.  There were figures on the beach, moving dark dots on the white semicircle bounded by the stockades, backed by roof ridges above the palm groves.  Further back the mass of carved white coral on the roof of the mosque shone like a white day-star.  Religion and politics—­always politics!  To the left, before Tengga’s enclosure, the loom of fire had changed into a pillar of smoke.  But there were some big trees over there and she couldn’t tell whether the night council had prolonged its sitting.  Some vague forms were still moving there and she could picture them to herself:  Daman, the supreme chief of sea-robbers, with a vengeful heart and the eyes of a gazelle; Sentot, the sour fanatic with the big turban, that other saint with a scanty loin cloth and ashes in his hair, and Tengga whom she could imagine from hearsay, fat, good-tempered, crafty, but ready to spill blood on his ambitious way and already bold enough to flaunt a yellow state umbrella at the very gate of Belarab’s stockade—­so they said.