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When Lingard stepped out on the poop of the Lightning the open water had turned purple already in the evening light, while to the east the Shallows made a steely glitter all along the sombre line of the shore. Lingard, with folded arms, looked over the sea. Carter approached him and spoke quietly. "The tide has turned and the night is coming on. Hadn't we better get away from these Shoals, sir?"

"While I was talking to you that evening from the boat it was already too late. No. There was never any time for it. I have told you all about myself, Mrs. Travers, and you know that I speak the truth when I say too late. If you had only been alone in that yacht going about the seas!" "Yes," she struck in, "but I was not alone." Lingard dropped his chin on his breast.

It can't be good for you to stew on board like that, day after day." Lingard did not answer. The image evoked by Almayer; the picture of Willems ranging over the islands and disturbing the harmony of the universe by robbery, treachery, and violence, held him silent, entranced painfully spellbound.

Lingard swung half round and gazed down at her. Veiled now she confronted him boldly. "Tell me, Captain Lingard, how many eyes were looking at us a little while ago?" "Do you care?" he asked. "Not in the least," she said. "A million stars were looking on, too, and what did it matter? They were not of the world I know. And it's just the same with the eyes. They are not of the world I live in."

"What's this?" he exclaimed in a wondering whisper then added in a tone of sharp command: "Stand up!" She rose at once and stood looking at him, timorous and fearless; yet with a fire of recklessness burning in her eyes that made clear her resolve to pursue her purpose even to the death. Lingard went on in a severe voice "Go out of my path.

"Yes, for a few hours, or for life," Lingard said in measured tones. "I may have to die with them or to die maybe for others. For you, if I only knew how to manage it, I would want to live. I am telling you this because it is dark. If there had been a light in here I wouldn't have come in." "I wish you had not," uttered the same unringing woman's voice.

No one had ever called her NELLY; yet she had long remained a girl, lingering on the broken borderland after several of her school companions had become young matrons. Her drawing-master, a man of some observation and insight, used to say Miss Lingard would wake up somewhere about forty.

"She has gone . . . where naturally she would be anxious to go first of all since she has managed to come to us," answered d'Alcacer, wording his answer with the utmost regard for the delicacy of the situation. The stillness of Lingard seemed to have grown even more impressive. He spoke again. "I wonder what those two can have to say to each other."

And you must not forget that one of your queens once stepped on the cloak of perhaps such a man." Her eyes sparkled and she dropped them suddenly. "I am not a queen," she said, coldly. "Unfortunately not," he admitted; "but then the other was a woman with no charm but her crown." At that moment Lingard, to whom Hassim had been talking earnestly, protested aloud: "I never saw these people before."

A swift, gray November wind had taken every chimney of the house for an organ-pipe, and was roaring in them all at once, quelling the more distant and varied noises of the woods, which moaned and surged like a sea. Helen Lingard had not been out all day.