“I think I understand,” said Lingard, “but don’t you know the man is light-headed?  A man like that is as good as mad.”

“Yes, he had been slightly delirious since seven o’clock,” said d’Alcacer.  “But believe me, Captain Lingard,” he continued, earnestly, and obeying a perfectly disinterested impulse, “that even in his delirium he is far more understandable to her and better able to understand her than . . . anybody within a hundred miles from here.”

“Ah!” said Lingard without any emotion, “so you don’t wonder.  You don’t see any reason for wonder.”

“No, for, don’t you see, I do know.”

“What do you know?”

“Men and women, Captain Lingard, which you. . . .”

“I don’t know any woman.”

“You have spoken the strictest truth there,” said d’Alcacer, and for the first time Lingard turned his head slowly and looked at his neighbour on the bench.

“Do you think she is as good as mad, too?” asked Lingard in a startled voice.

D’Alcacer let escape a low exclamation.  No, certainly he did not think so.  It was an original notion to suppose that lunatics had a sort of common logic which made them understandable to each other.  D’Alcacer tried to make his voice as gentle as possible while he pursued:  “No, Captain Lingard, I believe the woman of whom we speak is and will always remain in the fullest possession of herself.”

Lingard, leaning back, clasped his hands round his knees.  He seemed not to be listening and d’Alcacer, pulling a cigarette case out of his pocket, looked for a long time at the three cigarettes it contained.  It was the last of the provision he had on him when captured.  D’Alcacer had put himself on the strictest allowance.  A cigarette was only to be lighted on special occasions; and now there were only three left and they had to be made to last till the end of life.  They calmed, they soothed, they gave an attitude.  And only three left!  One had to be kept for the morning, to be lighted before going through the gate of doom—­the gate of Belarab’s stockade.  A cigarette soothed, it gave an attitude.  Was this the fitting occasion for one of the remaining two?  D’Alcacer, a true Latin, was not afraid of a little introspection.  In the pause he descended into the innermost depths of his being, then glanced up at the night sky.  Sportsman, traveller, he had often looked up at the stars before to see how time went.  It was going very slowly.  He took out a cigarette, snapped-to the case, bent down to the embers.  Then he sat up and blew out a thin cloud of smoke.  The man by his side looked with his bowed head and clasped knee like a masculine rendering of mournful meditation.  Such attitudes are met with sometimes on the sculptures of ancient tombs.  D’Alcacer began to speak: 

“She is a representative woman and yet one of those of whom there are but very few at any time in the world.  Not that they are very rare but that there is but little room on top.  They are the iridescent gleams on a hard and dark surface.  For the world is hard, Captain Lingard, it is hard, both in what it will remember and in what it will forget.  It is for such women that people toil on the ground and underground and artists of all sorts invoke their inspiration.”