I suffer mostly from, strange to say, is cold.'
Mrs. Travers and Lingard were waiting near the gangway. To everybody's extreme surprise Mr. Travers addressed his wife first.
'You were always laughing at people's crazes,' was what he said, 'and now you have a craze of your own. But we won't discuss that.'
D'Alcacer passed on, raising his cap to Mrs. Travers, and went down the ship's side into the boat. Jorgenson had vanished in his own manner like an exorcised ghost, and Lingard, stepping back, left husband and wife face to face.
'Did you think I was going to make a fuss?' asked Mr. Travers in a very low voice. 'I assure you I would rather go than stay here. You didn't think that? You have lost all sense of reality, of probability. I was just thinking this evening that I would rather be anywhere than here looking on at you. At your folly. . . .'
Mrs. Travers' loud, 'Martin!' made Lingard wince, caused d'Alcacer to lift his head down there in the boat, and even Jorgenson, forward somewhere out of sight, ceased mumbling in his moustache. The only person who seemed not to have heard that exclamation was Mr. Travers himself, who continued smoothly:
'. . . at the aberration of your mind, you who seemed so superior to common credulities. You are not yourself, not at all, and some day you will admit to me that . . . No, the best thing will be to forget it, as you will soon see yourself. We shall never mention that subject in the future. I am certain you will be only too glad to agree with me on that point.'
'How far ahead are you looking?' asked Mrs. Travers, finding her voice and even the very tone in which she would have addressed him had they been about to part in the hall of their town house. She might have been asking him at what time he expected to be home, while a footman held the door open and the brougham waited in the street.
'Not very far. This can't last much longer.' Mr. Travers made a movement as if to leave her exactly as though he were rather pressed to keep an appointment. 'By the by,' he said, checking himself, 'I suppose the fellow understands thoroughly that we are wealthy. He could hardly doubt that.'
'It's the last thought that would enter his head,' said Mrs. Travers.
'Oh, yes, just so,' Mr. Travers allowed a little impatience to pierce under his casual manner. 'But I don't mind telling you that I have had enough of this. I am prepared to make—ah!—to make concessions. A large pecuniary sacrifice. Only the whole position is so absurd! He might conceivably doubt my good faith. Wouldn't it be just as well if you, with your particular influence, would hint to him that with me he would have nothing to fear? I am a man of my word.'
'That is the first thing he would naturally think of any man,' said Mrs. Travers.
'Will your eyes never be opened?' Mr. Travers began, irritably, then gave it up. 'Well, so much the better then. I give you a free hand.'
'What made you change your attitude like this?' asked Mrs. Travers, suspiciously.
'My regard for you,' he answered without hesitation.
'I intended to join you in your captivity. I was just trying to persuade him. . . .'
'I forbid you absolutely,' whispered Mr. Travers, forcibly. 'I am glad to get away. I don't want to see you again till your craze is over.'
She was confounded by his secret vehemence. But instantly succeeding his fierce whisper came a short, inane society laugh and a much louder, 'Not that I attach any importance . . .'
He sprang away, as it were, from his wife, and as he went over the gangway waved his hand to her amiably.
Lighted dimly by the lantern on the roof of the deckhouse Mrs. Travers remained very still with lowered head and an aspect of profound meditation. It lasted but an instant before she moved off and brushing against Lingard passed on with downcast eyes to her deck cabin. Lingard heard the door shut. He waited awhile, made a movement toward the gangway but checked himself and followed Mrs. Travers into her cabin.
It was pitch dark in there. He could see absolutely nothing and was oppressed by the profound stillness unstirred even by the sound of breathing.
'I am going on shore,' he began, breaking the black and deathlike silence enclosing him and the invisible woman. 'I wanted to say good-bye.'
'You are going on shore,' repeated Mrs. Travers. Her voice was emotionless, blank, unringing.
'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. 'You are always coming to me with those lives and those deaths in your hand.'
'Yes, it's too much for you,' was Lingard's undertoned comment. 'You could be no other than true. And you are innocent! Don't wish me life, but wish me luck, for you are innocent—and you will have to take your chance.'
'All luck to you, King Tom,' he heard her say in the darkness in which he seemed now to perceive the gleam of her hair. 'I will take my chance. And try not to come near me again for I am weary of you.'
'I can well believe it,' murmured Lingard, and stepped out of the cabin, shutting the door after him gently. For half a minute, perhaps, the stillness continued, and then suddenly the chair fell over in the darkness. Next moment Mrs. Travers' head appeared in the light of the lamp left on the roof of the deckhouse. Her bare arms grasped the door posts.
'Wait a moment,' she said, loudly, into the shadows of the deck. She heard no footsteps, saw nothing moving except the vanishing white shape of the late Captain H. C. Jorgenson, who was indifferent to the life of men. 'Wait, King Tom!' she insisted, raising her voice; then, 'I didn't mean it. Don't believe me!' she cried, recklessly.
For the second time that night a woman's voice startled the hearts of men on board the Emma. All except the heart of old Jorgenson. The Malays in the boat looked up from their thwarts. D'Alcacer, sitting in the stern sheets
