She had only very few steps to make, but before she had stopped, confronting Immada, d’Alcacer remembered her suddenly as he had seen her last, out West, far away, impossibly different, as if in another universe, as if presented by the fantasy of a fevered memory.  He saw her in a luminous perspective of palatial drawing rooms, in the restless eddy and flow of a human sea, at the foot of walls high as cliffs, under lofty ceilings that like a tropical sky flung light and heat upon the shallow glitter of uniforms, of stars, of diamonds, of eyes sparkling in the weary or impassive faces of the throng at an official reception.  Outside he had found the unavoidable darkness with its aspect of patient waiting, a cloudy sky holding back the dawn of a London morning.  It was difficult to believe.

Lingard, who had been looking dangerously fierce, slapped his thigh and showed signs of agitation.

“By heavens, I had forgotten all about you!” he pronounced in dismay.

Mrs. Travers fixed her eyes on Immada.  Fairhaired and white she asserted herself before the girl of olive face and raven locks with the maturity of perfection, with the superiority of the flower over the leaf, of the phrase that contains a thought over the cry that can only express an emotion.  Immense spaces and countless centuries stretched between them:  and she looked at her as when one looks into one’s own heart with absorbed curiosity, with still wonder, with an immense compassion.  Lingard murmured, warningly: 

“Don’t touch her.”

Mrs. Travers looked at him.

“Do you think I could hurt her?” she asked, softly, and was so startled to hear him mutter a gloomy “Perhaps,” that she hesitated before she smiled.

“Almost a child!  And so pretty!  What a delicate face,” she said, while another deep sigh of the sea breeze lifted and let fall the screens, so that the sound, the wind, and the glitter seemed to rush in together and bear her words away into space.  “I had no idea of anything so charmingly gentle,” she went on in a voice that without effort glowed, caressed, and had a magic power of delight to the soul.  “So young!  And she lives here—­does she?  On the sea—­or where?  Lives—­” Then faintly, as if she had been in the act of speaking, removed instantly to a great distance, she was heard again:  “How does she live?”

Lingard had hardly seen Edith Travers till then.  He had seen no one really but Mr. Travers.  He looked and listened with something of the stupor of a new sensation.

Then he made a distinct effort to collect his thoughts and said with a remnant of anger: 

“What have you got to do with her?  She knows war.  Do you know anything about it?  And hunger, too, and thirst, and unhappiness; things you have only heard about.  She has been as near death as I am to you—­and what is all that to any of you here?”

“That child!” she said in slow wonder.