Round them all sounds had ceased.  The men had secured again the opening through which those arms had snatched her into a moment of self-forgetfulness which had left her out of breath but uncrushed.  As if something imperative had been satisfied she had a moment of inward serenity, a period of peace without thought while, holding to that arm that trembled no more than an arm of iron, she felt stealthily over the ground for one of the sandals which she had lost.  Oh, yes, there was no doubt of it, she had been carried off the earth, without shame, without regret.  But she would not have let him know of that dropped sandal for anything in the world.  That lost sandal was as symbolic as a dropped veil.  But he did not know of it.  He must never know.  Where was that thing?  She felt sure that they had not moved an inch from that spot.  Presently her foot found it and still gripping Lingard’s forearm she stooped to secure it properly.  When she stood up, still holding his arm, they confronted each other, he rigid in an effort of self-command but feeling as if the surges of the heaviest sea that he could remember in his life were running through his heart; and the woman as if emptied of all feeling by her experience, without thought yet, but beginning to regain her sense of the situation and the memory of the immediate past.

“I have been watching at that loophole for an hour, ever since they came running to me with that story of the rockets,” said Lingard.  “I was shut up with Belarab then.  I was looking out when the torch blazed and you stepped ashore.  I thought I was dreaming.  But what could I do?  I felt I must rush to you but I dared not.  That clump of palms is full of men.  So are the houses you saw that time you came ashore with me.  Full of men.  Armed men.  A trigger is soon pulled and when once shooting begins. . . .  And you walking in the open with that light above your head!  I didn’t dare.  You were safer alone.  I had the strength to hold myself in and watch you come up from the shore.  No!  No man that ever lived had seen such a sight.  What did you come for?”

“Didn’t you expect somebody?  I don’t mean me, I mean a messenger?”

“No!” said Lingard, wondering at his own self-control.  “Why did he let you come?”

“You mean Captain Jorgenson?  Oh, he refused at first.  He said that he had your orders.”

“How on earth did you manage to get round him?” said Lingard in his softest tones.

“I did not try,” she began and checked herself.  Lingard’s question, though he really didn’t seem to care much about an answer, had aroused afresh her suspicion of Jorgenson’s change of front.  “I didn’t have to say very much at the last,” she continued, gasping yet a little and feeling her personality, crushed to nothing in the hug of those arms, expand again to its full significance before the attentive immobility of that man.  “Captain Jorgenson has always looked upon me as a nuisance.  Perhaps he had made up his mind to get rid of me even against your orders.  Is he quite sane?”