“Martin is asleep,” said Mrs. Travers in a tone that seemed to have borrowed something of the mystery and quietness of the night.

“All the world’s asleep,” observed d’Alcacer, so low that Mrs. Travers barely caught the words, “Except you and me, and one other who has left me to wander about in the night.”

“Was he with you?  Where has he gone?”

“Where it’s darkest I should think,” answered d’Alcacer, secretly.  “It’s no use going to look for him; but if you keep perfectly still and hold your breath you may presently hear his footsteps.”

“What did he tell you?” breathed out Mrs. Travers.

“I didn’t ask him anything.  I only know that something has happened which has robbed him of his power of thinking . . .  Hadn’t I better go to the hut?  Don Martin ought to have someone with him when he wakes up.”  Mrs. Travers remained perfectly still and even now and then held her breath with a vague fear of hearing those footsteps wandering in the dark.  D’Alcacer had disappeared.  Again Mrs. Travers held her breath.  No.  Nothing.  Not a sound.  Only the night to her eyes seemed to have grown darker.  Was that a footstep?  “Where could I hide myself?” she thought.  But she didn’t move.

After leaving d’Alcacer, Lingard threading his way between the fires found himself under the big tree, the same tree against which Daman had been leaning on the day of the great talk when the white prisoners had been surrendered to Lingard’s keeping on definite conditions.  Lingard passed through the deep obscurity made by the outspread boughs of the only witness left there of a past that for endless ages had seen no mankind on this shore defended by the Shallows, around this lagoon overshadowed by the jungle.  In the calm night the old giant, without shudders or murmurs in its enormous limbs, saw the restless man drift through the black shade into the starlight.

In that distant part of the courtyard there were only a few sentries who, themselves invisible, saw Lingard’s white figure pace to and fro endlessly.  They knew well who that was.  It was the great white man.  A very great man.  A very rich man.  A possessor of fire-arms, who could dispense valuable gifts and deal deadly blows, the friend of their Ruler, the enemy of his enemies, known to them for years and always mysterious.  At their posts, flattened against the stakes near convenient loopholes, they cast backward glances and exchanged faint whispers from time to time.

Lingard might have thought himself alone.  He had lost touch with the world.  What he had said to d’Alcacer was perfectly true.  He had no thought.  He was in the state of a man who, having cast his eyes through the open gates of Paradise, is rendered insensible by that moment’s vision to all the forms and matters of the earth; and in the extremity of his emotion ceases even to look upon himself but as the subject of a sublime experience which exalts or unfits, sanctifies or damns—­he didn’t know which.  Every shadowy thought, every passing sensation was like a base intrusion on that supreme memory.  He couldn’t bear it.