Carter nodded.  He resented the turn of the incident and the growing impulse to surrender to that man.

“Mrs. Travers trusts me though,” went on Lingard with gentle triumph as if advancing an unanswerable argument.

“So she says,” grunted Carter; “I warned her.  She’s a baby.  They’re all as innocent as babies there.  And you know it.  And I know it.  I’ve heard of your kind.  You would dump the lot of us overboard if it served your turn.  That’s what I think.”

“And that’s all.”

Carter nodded slightly and looked away.  There was a silence.  Lingard’s eyes travelled over the brig.  The lighted part of the vessel appeared in bright and wavering detail walled and canopied by the night.  He felt a light breath on his face.  The air was stirring, but the Shallows, silent and lost in the darkness, gave no sound of life.

This stillness oppressed Lingard.  The world of his endeavours and his hopes seemed dead, seemed gone.  His desire existed homeless in the obscurity that had devoured his corner of the sea, this stretch of the coast, his certitude of success.  And here in the midst of what was the domain of his adventurous soul there was a lost youngster ready to shoot him on suspicion of some extravagant treachery.  Came ready to shoot!  That’s good, too!  He was too weary to laugh—­and perhaps too sad.  Also the danger of the pistol-shot, which he believed real—­the young are rash—­irritated him.  The night and the spot were full of contradictions.  It was impossible to say who in this shadowy warfare was to be an enemy, and who were the allies.  So close were the contacts issuing from this complication of a yachting voyage, that he seemed to have them all within his breast.

“Shoot me!  He is quite up to that trick—­damn him.  Yet I would trust him sooner than any man in that yacht.”

Such were his thoughts while he looked at Carter, who was biting his lips, in the vexation of the long silence.  When they spoke again to each other they talked soberly, with a sense of relief, as if they had come into cool air from an overheated room and when Carter, dismissed, went into his boat, he had practically agreed to the line of action traced by Lingard for the crew of the yacht.  He had agreed as if in implicit confidence.  It was one of the absurdities of the situation which had to be accepted and could never be understood.

“Do I talk straight now?” had asked Lingard.

“It seems straight enough,” assented Carter with an air of reserve; “I will work with you so far anyhow.”

“Mrs. Travers trusts me,” remarked Lingard again.

“By the Lord Harry!” cried Carter, giving way suddenly to some latent conviction.  “I was warning her against you.  Say, Captain, you are a devil of a man.  How did you manage it?”

“I trusted her,” said Lingard.

“Did you?” cried the amazed Carter.  “When?  How?  Where—­”

“You know too much already,” retorted Lingard, quietly.  “Waste no time.  I will be after you.”