"You--You--" He stammered and stared. He chewed with growls some
insulting word and at last swallowed it with an effort. "My time pays
for your life," he said.

He became aware of a sudden stir, and saw that Mrs. Travers had risen
from her chair.

She walked impulsively toward the group on the quarter-deck, making
straight for Immada. Hassim had stepped aside and his detached gaze of a
Malay gentleman passed by her as if she had been invisible.

She was tall, supple, moving freely. Her complexion was so dazzling
in the shade that it seemed to throw out a halo round her head. Upon
a smooth and wide brow an abundance of pale fair hair, fine as silk,
undulating like the sea, heavy like a helmet, descended low without a
trace of gloss, without a gleam in its coils, as though it had never
been touched by a ray of light; and a throat white, smooth, palpitating
with life, a round neck modelled with strength and delicacy, supported
gloriously that radiant face and that pale mass of hair unkissed by
sunshine.

She said with animation:

"Why, it's a girl!"

Mrs. Travers extorted from d'Alcacer a fresh tribute of curiosity. A
strong puff of wind fluttered the awnings and one of the screens blowing
out wide let in upon the quarter-deck the rippling glitter of the
Shallows, showing to d'Alcacer the luminous vastness of the sea, with
the line of the distant horizon, dark like the edge of the encompassing
night, drawn at the height of Mrs. Travers' shoulder. . . . Where was
it he had seen her last--a long time before, on the other side of the
world? There was also the glitter of splendour around her then, and an
impression of luminous vastness. The encompassing night, too, was there,
the night that waits for its time to move forward upon the glitter, the
splendour, the men, the women.

He could not remember for the moment, but he became convinced that of
all the women he knew, she alone seemed to be made for action. Every one
of her movements had firmness, ease, the meaning of a vital fact,
the moral beauty of a fearless expression. Her supple figure was not
dishonoured by any faltering of outlines under the plain dress of dark
blue stuff moulding her form with bold simplicity.

She had only very few steps to make, but before she had stopped,
confronting Immada, d'Alcacer remembered her suddenly as he had seen
her last, out West, far away, impossibly different, as if in another
universe, as if presented by the fantasy of