The turning to the right, which was his way to his hotel, was only a very few steps farther.  He stopped again (all the houses of the sea-front were shut up, the quayside was deserted, but for one or two figures of natives walking in the distance) and began to reckon the amount of his bill.  So many days in the hotel at so many dollars a day.  To count the days he used his fingers:  plunging one hand into his pocket, he jingled a few silver coins.  All right for three days more; and then, unless something turned up, he must break into the five hundred—­Ivy’s money—­invested in her father.  It seemed to him that the first meal coming out of that reserve would choke him—­for certain.  Reason was of no use.  It was a matter of feeling.  His feelings had never played him false.

He did not turn to the right.  He walked on, as if there still had been a ship in the roadstead to which he could get himself pulled off in the evening.  Far away, beyond the houses, on the slope of an indigo promontory closing the view of the quays, the slim column of a factory-chimney smoked quietly straight up into the clear air.  A Chinaman, curled down in the stern of one of the half-dozen sampans floating off the end of the jetty, caught sight of a beckoning hand.  He jumped up, rolled his pigtail round his head swiftly, tucked in two rapid movements his wide dark trousers high up his yellow thighs, and by a single, noiseless, finlike stir of the oars, sheered the sampan alongside the steps with the ease and precision of a swimming fish.

“Sofala,” articulated Captain Whalley from above; and the Chinaman, a new emigrant probably, stared upwards with a tense attention as if waiting to see the queer word fall visibly from the white man’s lips.  “Sofala,” Captain Whalley repeated; and suddenly his heart failed him.  He paused.  The shores, the islets, the high ground, the low points, were dark:  the horizon had grown somber; and across the eastern sweep of the shore the white obelisk, marking the landing-place of the telegraph-cable, stood like a pale ghost on the beach before the dark spread of uneven roofs, intermingled with palms, of the native town.  Captain Whalley began again.

“Sofala.  Savee So-fa-la, John?”

This time the Chinaman made out that bizarre sound, and grunted his assent uncouthly, low down in his bare throat.  With the first yellow twinkle of a star that appeared like the head of a pin stabbed deep into the smooth, pale, shimmering fabric of the sky, the edge of a keen chill seemed to cleave through the warm air of the earth.  At the moment of stepping into the sampan to go and try for the command of the Sofala Captain Whalley shivered a little.