'It's absolutely no use your fishing for my thoughts, Mr. d'Alcacer. If I were to let you see them you would be appalled.'
'Thoughts really are but a shape of feelings. Let me congratulate you on the impassive mask you can put on those horrors you say you nurse in your breast. It was impossible to tell anything by your face.'
'You will always say flattering things.'
'Madame, my flatteries come from the very bottom of my heart. I have given up long ago all desire to please. And I was not trying to get at your thoughts. Whatever else you may expect from me you may count on my absolute respect for your privacy. But I suppose with a mask such as you can make for yourself you really don't care. The Man of Fate, I noticed, is not nearly as good at it as you are.'
'What a pretentious name. Do you call him by it to his face, Mr. d'Alcacer?'
'No, I haven't the cheek,' confessed d'Alcacer, equably. 'And, besides, it's too momentous for daily use. And he is so simple that he might mistake it for a joke and nothing could be further from my thoughts. Mrs. Travers, I will confess to you that I don't feel jocular in the least. But what can he know about people of our sort? And when I reflect how little people of our sort can know of such a man I am quite content to address him as Captain Lingard. It's common and soothing and most respectable and satisfactory; for Captain is the most empty of all titles. What is a Captain? Anybody can be a Captain; and for Lingard it's a name like any other. Whereas what he deserves is something special, significant, and expressive, that would match his person, his simple and romantic person.'
He perceived that Mrs. Travers was looking at him intently. They hastened to turn their eyes away from each other.
'He would like your appreciation,' Mrs. Travers let drop negligently.
'I am afraid he would despise it.'
'Despise it! Why, that sort of thing is the very breath of his nostrils.'
'You seem to understand him, Mrs. Travers. Women have a singular capacity for understanding. I mean subjects that interest them; because when their imagination is stimulated they are not afraid of letting it go. A man is more mistrustful of himself, but women are born much more reckless. They push on and on under the protection of secrecy and silence, and the greater the obscurity of what they wish to explore the greater their courage.'
'Do you mean seriously to tell me that you consider me a creature of darkness?'
'I spoke in general,' remonstrated d'Alcacer. 'Anything else would have been an impertinence. Yes, obscurity is women's best friend. Their daring loves it; but a sudden flash of light disconcerts them. Generally speaking, if they don't get exactly at the truth they always manage to come pretty near to it.'
Mrs. Travers had listened with silent attention and she allowed the silence to continue for some time after d'Alcacer had ceased. When she spoke it was to say in an unconcerned tone that as to this subject she had had special opportunities. Her self-possessed interlocutor managed to repress a movement of real curiosity under an assumption of conventional interest. 'Indeed,' he exclaimed, politely. 'A special opportunity. How did you manage to create it?'
This was too much for Mrs. Travers. 'I! Create it!' she exclaimed, indignantly, but under her breath. 'How on earth do you think I could have done it?'
Mr. d'Alcacer, as if communing with himself, was heard to murmur unrepentantly that indeed women seldom knew how they had 'done it,' to which Mrs. Travers in a weary tone returned the remark that no two men were dense in the same way. To this Mr. d'Alcacer assented without difficulty. 'Yes, our brand presents more varieties. This, from a certain point of view, is obviously to our advantage. We interest. . . . Not that I imagine myself interesting to you, Mrs. Travers. But what about the Man of Fate?'
'Oh, yes,' breathed out Mrs. Travers.
'I see! Immensely!' said d'Alcacer in a tone of mysterious understanding. 'Was his stupidity so colossal?'
'It was indistinguishable from great visions that were in no sense mean and made up for him a world of his own.'
'I guessed that much,' muttered d'Alcacer to himself. 'But that, you know, Mrs. Travers, that isn't good news at all to me. World of dreams, eh? That's very bad, very dangerous. It's almost fatal, Mrs. Travers.'
'Why all this dismay? Why do you object to a world of dreams?'
'Because I dislike the prospect of being made a sacrifice of by those Moors. I am not an optimist like our friend there,' he continued in a low tone nodding toward the dismal figure of Mr. Travers huddled up in the chair. 'I don't regard all this as a farce and I have discovered in myself a strong objection to having my throat cut by those gorgeous barbarians after a lot of fatuous talk. Don't ask me why, Mrs. Travers. Put it down to an absurd weakness.'
Mrs. Travers made a slight movement in her chair, raising her hands to her head, and in the dim light of the lanterns d'Alcacer saw the mass of her clear gleaming hair fall down and spread itself over her shoulders. She seized half of it in her hands which looked very white, and with her head inclined a little on one side she began to make a plait.
'You are terrifying,' he said after watching the movement of her fingers for a while.
'Yes . . . ?' she accentuated interrogatively.
'You have the awfulness of the predestined. You, too, are the prey of dreams.'
'Not of the Moors, then,' she uttered, calmly, beginning the other plait. D'Alcacer followed the operation to the end. Close against her, her diaphanous shadow on the muslin reproduced her slightest movements. D'Alcacer turned his eyes away.
'No! No barbarian shall touch you. Because if it comes to that I believe
A minute elapsed before he stole a glance in her direction. She was leaning back again, her hands had fallen on her lap and her head with a plait of hair on each side of her face, her head incredibly changed in character and suggesting something medieval, ascetic, drooped dreamily on her breast.
D'Alcacer waited, holding his breath. She didn't move. In the dim gleam of jewelled clasps, the faint sheen of
