tive help is sure to come very soon."

"Affect me! Is that precious watchman of yours coming aft? I don't want
anybody to know I came here again begging, even of you. Is he coming
aft? . . . Listen! I've stopped your other boat."

His head and shoulders disappeared as though he had dived into a denser
layer of obscurity floating on the water. The watchman, who had the
intention to stretch himself in one of the deck chairs, catching sight
of the owner's wife, walked straight to the lamp that hung under the
ridge pole of the awning, and after fumbling with it for a time went
away forward with an indolent gait.

"You dared!" Mrs. Travers whispered down in an intense tone; and
directly, Lingard's head emerged again below her with an upturned face.

"It was dare--or give up. The help from the Straits would have been too
late anyhow if I hadn't the power to keep you safe; and if I had the
power I could see you through it--alone. I expected to find a reasonable
man to talk to. I ought to have known better. You come from too far to
understand these things. Well, I dared; I've sent after your other boat
a fellow who, with me at his back, would try to stop the governor of
the Straits himself. He will do it. Perhaps it's done already. You
have nothing to hope for. But I am here. You said you believed I meant
well--"

"Yes," she murmured.

"That's why I thought I would tell you everything. I had to begin with
this business about the boat. And what do you think of me now? I've cut
you off from the rest of the earth. You people would disappear like a
stone in the water. You left one foreign port for another. Who's there
to trouble about what became of you? Who would know? Who could guess? It
would be months before they began to stir."

"I understand," she said, steadily, "we are helpless."

"And alone," he added.

After a pause she said in a deliberate, restrained voice:

"What does this mean? Plunder, captivity?"

"It would have meant death if I hadn't been here," he answered.

"But you have the power to--"

"Why, do you think, you are alive yet?" he cried. "Jorgenson has been
arguing with them on shore," he went on, more calmly, with a swing of
his arm toward where the night seemed darkest. "Do you think he would
have kept them back if they hadn't expected me every day? His words
would have been nothing without my fist."

She heard a dull blow struck on the side of the yacht and concealed in
the same darkness that