“Oh, my scarf,” said Mrs. Travers.

A short, squat, broad-faced young fellow having for all costume a pair of white drawers was offering the scarf thrown over both his arms, as if they had been sticks, and holding it respectfully as far as possible from his person.  Lingard took it from him and Mrs. Travers claimed it at once.  “Don’t forget the proprieties,” she said.  “This is also my face veil.”

She was arranging it about her head when Lingard said, “There is no need.  I am taking you to those gentlemen.”—­“I will use it all the same,” said Mrs. Travers.  “This thing works both ways, as a matter of propriety or as a matter of precaution.  Till I have an opportunity of looking into a mirror nothing will persuade me that there isn’t some change in my face.”  Lingard swung half round and gazed down at her.  Veiled now she confronted him boldly.  “Tell me, Captain Lingard, how many eyes were looking at us a little while ago?”

“Do you care?” he asked.

“Not in the least,” she said.  “A million stars were looking on, too, and what did it matter?  They were not of the world I know.  And it’s just the same with the eyes.  They are not of the world I live in.”

Lingard thought:  “Nobody is.”  Never before had she seemed to him more unapproachable, more different and more remote.  The glow of a number of small fires lighted the ground only, and brought out the black bulk of men lying down in the thin drift of smoke.  Only one of these fires, rather apart and burning in front of the house which was the quarter of the prisoners, might have been called a blaze and even that was not a great one.  It didn’t penetrate the dark space between the piles and the depth of the verandah above where only a couple of heads and the glint of a spearhead could be seen dimly in the play of the light.  But down on the ground outside, the black shape of a man seated on a bench had an intense relief.  Another intensely black shadow threw a handful of brushwood on the fire and went away.  The man on the bench got up.  It was d’Alcacer.  He let Lingard and Mrs. Travers come quite close up to him.  Extreme surprise seemed to have made him dumb.

“You didn’t expect . . .” began Mrs. Travers with some embarrassment before that mute attitude.

“I doubted my eyes,” struck in d’Alcacer, who seemed embarrassed, too.  Next moment he recovered his tone and confessed simply:  “At the moment I wasn’t thinking of you, Mrs. Travers.”  He passed his hand over his forehead.  “I hardly know what I was thinking of.”

In the light of the shooting-up flame Mrs. Travers could see d’Alcacer’s face.  There was no smile on it.  She could not remember ever seeing him so grave and, as it were, so distant.  She abandoned Lingard’s arm and moved closer to the fire.

“I fancy you were very far away, Mr. d’Alcacer,” she said.