“It was dare—­or give up.  The help from the Straits would have been too late anyhow if I hadn’t the power to keep you safe; and if I had the power I could see you through it—­alone.  I expected to find a reasonable man to talk to.  I ought to have known better.  You come from too far to understand these things.  Well, I dared; I’ve sent after your other boat a fellow who, with me at his back, would try to stop the governor of the Straits himself.  He will do it.  Perhaps it’s done already.  You have nothing to hope for.  But I am here.  You said you believed I meant well—­”

“Yes,” she murmured.

“That’s why I thought I would tell you everything.  I had to begin with this business about the boat.  And what do you think of me now?  I’ve cut you off from the rest of the earth.  You people would disappear like a stone in the water.  You left one foreign port for another.  Who’s there to trouble about what became of you?  Who would know?  Who could guess?  It would be months before they began to stir.”

“I understand,” she said, steadily, “we are helpless.”

“And alone,” he added.

After a pause she said in a deliberate, restrained voice: 

“What does this mean?  Plunder, captivity?”

“It would have meant death if I hadn’t been here,” he answered.

“But you have the power to—­”

“Why, do you think, you are alive yet?” he cried.  “Jorgenson has been arguing with them on shore,” he went on, more calmly, with a swing of his arm toward where the night seemed darkest.  “Do you think he would have kept them back if they hadn’t expected me every day?  His words would have been nothing without my fist.”

She heard a dull blow struck on the side of the yacht and concealed in the same darkness that wrapped the unconcern of the earth and sea, the fury and the pain of hearts; she smiled above his head, fascinated by the simplicity of images and expressions.

Lingard made a brusque movement, the lively little boat being unsteady under his feet, and she spoke slowly, absently, as if her thought had been lost in the vagueness of her sensations.

“And this—­this—­Jorgenson, you said?  Who is he?”

“A man,” he answered, “a man like myself.”

“Like yourself?”

“Just like myself,” he said with strange reluctance, as if admitting a painful truth.  “More sense, perhaps, but less luck.  Though, since your yacht has turned up here, I begin to think that my luck is nothing much to boast of either.”

“Is our presence here so fatal?”

“It may be death to some.  It may be worse than death to me.  And it rests with you in a way.  Think of that!  I can never find such another chance again.  But that’s nothing!  A man who has saved my life once and that I passed my word to would think I had thrown him over.  But that’s nothing!  Listen!  As true as I stand here in my boat talking to you, I believe the girl would die of grief.”