She leaned back against a tree. Heyst faced her in the same attitude of leisure, as if they had done with time and all the other concerns of the earth. Suddenly, high above their heads the roof of leaves whispered at them tumultuously and then ceased.
'That was a strange notion of yours, to send me away,' she said. 'Send me away? What for? Yes, what for?'
'You seem indignant,' he remarked listlessly.
'To these savages, too!' she pursued. 'And you think I would have gone? You can do what you like with me— but not that, not that!'
Heyst looked into the dim aisles of the forest. Everything was so still now that the very ground on which they stood seemed to exhale silence into the shade.
'Why be indignant?' he remonstrated. 'It has not happened. I gave up pleading with Wang. Here we are, repulsed! Not only without power to resist the evil, but unable to make terms for ourselves with the worthy envoys, the envoys extraordinary of the world we thought we had done with for years and years. And that's bad, Lena, very bad.'
'It's funny,' she said thoughtfully. 'Bad? I suppose it is. I don't know that it is. But do you? Do you? You talk as if you didn't believe in it.'
She gazed at him earnestly.
'Do I? Ah! That's it. I don't know how to talk. I have managed to refine everything away. I've said to the Earth that bore me: 'I am I and you are a shadow.' And, by Jove, it is so! But it appears that such words cannot be uttered with impunity. Here I am on a Shadow inhabited by Shades. How helpless a man is against the Shades! How is one to intimidate, persuade, resist, assert oneself against them? I have lost all belief in realities . . . Lena, give me your hand.'
She looked at him surprised, uncomprehending.
'Your hand,' he cried.
She obeyed; he seized it with avidity as if eager to raise it to his lips, but halfway up released his grasp. They looked at each other for a time.
'What's the matter, dear?' she whispered timidly.
'Neither force nor conviction,' Heyst muttered wearily to himself. 'How am I to meet this charmingly simple problem?'
'I am sorry,' she murmured.
'And so am I,' he confessed quickly. 'And the bitterest of this humiliation is its complete uselessness—which I feel, I feel!'
She had never before seen him give such signs of feeling. Across his ghastly face the long moustaches flamed in the shade. He spoke suddenly:
'I wonder if I could find enough courage to creep among them in the night, with a knife, and cut their throats one after another, as they slept! I wonder—'
She was frightened by his unwonted appearance more than by the words in his mouth, and said earnestly:
'Don't you try to do such a thing! Don't you think of it!'
'I don't possess anything bigger than a penknife. As to thinking of it, Lena, there's no saying what one may think of. I don't think. Something in me thinks—something foreign to my nature. What is the matter?'
He noticed her parted lips, and the peculiar stare in her eyes, which had wandered from his face.
'There's somebody after us. I saw something white moving,' she cried.
Heyst did not turn his head; he only glanced at her out-stretched arm.
'No doubt we are followed; we are watched.'
'I don't see anything now,' she said.
'And it does not matter,' Heyst went on in his ordinary voice. 'Here we are in the forest. I have neither strength nor persuasion. Indeed, it's extremely difficult to be eloquent before a Chinaman's head stuck at one out of a lot of brushwood. But can we wander among these big trees indefinitely? Is this a refuge? No! What else is left to us? I did think for a moment of the mine; but even there we could not remain very long. And then that gallery is not safe. The props were too weak to begin with. Ants have been at work there—ants after the men. A death-trap, at best. One can die but once, but there are many manners of death.'
The girl glanced about fearfully, in search of the watcher or follower whom she had glimpsed once among the trees; but if he existed, he had concealed himself. Nothing met her eyes but the deepening shadows of the short vistas between the living columns of the still roof of leaves. She looked at the man beside her expectantly, tenderly, with suppressed affright and a sort of awed wonder.
'I have also thought of these people's boat,' Heyst went on. 'We could get into that, and—only they have taken everything out of her. I have seen her oars and mast in a corner of their room. To shove off in an empty boat would be nothing but a desperate expedient, supposing even that she would drift out a good distance between the islands before the morning. It would only be a complicated manner of committing suicide—to be found dead in a boat, dead from sun and thirst. A sea mystery. I wonder who would find us! Davidson, perhaps; but Davidson passed westward ten days ago. I watched him steaming past one early morning, from the jetty.'
'You never told me,' she said.
'He must have been looking at me through his big binoculars. Perhaps, if I had raised my arm—but what did we want with Davidson then, you and I? He won't be back this way for three weeks or more, Lena. I wish I had raised my arm that morning.'
'What would have been the good of it?' she sighed out.
'What good? No good, of course. We had no forebodings. This seemed to be an inexpugnable refuge, where we
