“I do hope you have nothing to tell me,” he said with whimsical earnestness.

“I?  No!  Have you?”

He assured her he had not, and proffered a request.  “Don’t let us tell each other anything, Mrs. Travers.  Don’t let us think of anything.  I believe it will be the best way to get over the evening.”  There was real anxiety in his jesting tone.

“Very well,” Mrs. Travers assented, seriously.  “But in that case we had better not remain together.”  She asked, then, d’Alcacer to go below and sit with Mr. Travers who didn’t like to be left alone.  “Though he, too, doesn’t seem to want to be told anything,” she added, parenthetically, and went on:  “But I must ask you something else, Mr. d’Alcacer.  I propose to sit down in this chair and go to sleep—­if I can.  Will you promise to call me about five o’clock?  I prefer not to speak to any one on deck, and, moreover, I can trust you.”

He bowed in silence and went away slowly.  Mrs. Travers, turning her head, perceived a steady light at the brig’s yard-arm, very bright among the tarnished stars.  She walked aft and looked over the taffrail.  It was exactly like that other night.  She half expected to hear presently the low, rippling sound of an advancing boat.  But the universe remained without a sound.  When she at last dropped into the deck chair she was absolutely at the end of her power of thinking.  “I suppose that’s how the condemned manage to get some sleep on the night before the execution,” she said to herself a moment before her eyelids closed as if under a leaden hand.

She woke up, with her face wet with tears, out of a vivid dream of Lingard in chain-mail armour and vaguely recalling a Crusader, but bare-headed and walking away from her in the depths of an impossible landscape.  She hurried on to catch up with him but a throng of barbarians with enormous turbans came between them at the last moment and she lost sight of him forever in the flurry of a ghastly sand-storm.  What frightened her most was that she had not been able to see his face.  It was then that she began to cry over her hard fate.  When she woke up the tears were still rolling down her cheeks and she perceived in the light of the deck-lamp d’Alcacer arrested a little way off.

“Did you have to speak to me?” she asked.

“No,” said d’Alcacer.  “You didn’t give me time.  When I came as far as this I fancied I heard you sobbing.  It must have been a delusion.”

“Oh, no.  My face is wet yet.  It was a dream.  I suppose it is five o’clock.  Thank you for being so punctual.  I have something to do before sunrise.”

D’Alcacer moved nearer.  “I know.  You have decided to keep an appointment on the sandbank.  Your husband didn’t utter twenty words in all these hours but he managed to tell me that piece of news.”

“I shouldn’t have thought,” she murmured, vaguely.

“He wanted me to understand that it had no importance,” stated d’Alcacer in a very serious tone.