an inch from that spot.
Presently her foot found it and still gripping Lingard's forearm she
stooped to secure it properly. When she stood up, still holding his arm,
they confronted each other, he rigid in an effort of self-command but
feeling as if the surges of the heaviest sea that he could remember in
his life were running through his heart; and the woman as if emptied
of all feeling by her experience, without thought yet, but beginning to
regain her sense of the situation and the memory of the immediate past.

"I have been watching at that loophole for an hour, ever since they came
running to me with that story of the rockets," said Lingard. "I was shut
up with Belarab then. I was looking out when the torch blazed and you
stepped ashore. I thought I was dreaming. But what could I do? I felt I
must rush to you but I dared not. That clump of palms is full of men. So
are the houses you saw that time you came ashore with me. Full of men.
Armed men. A trigger is soon pulled and when once shooting begins. . . .
And you walking in the open with that light above your head! I didn't
dare. You were safer alone. I had the strength to hold myself in and
watch you come up from the shore. No! No man that ever lived had seen
such a sight. What did you come for?"

"Didn't you expect somebody? I don't mean me, I mean a messenger?"

"No!" said Lingard, wondering at his own self-control. "Why did he let
you come?"

"You mean Captain Jorgenson? Oh, he refused at first. He said that he
had your orders."

"How on earth did you manage to get round him?" said Lingard in his
softest tones.

"I did not try," she began and checked herself. Lingard's question,
though he really didn't seem to care much about an answer, had aroused
afresh her suspicion of Jorgenson's change of front. "I didn't have
to say very much at the last," she continued, gasping yet a little and
feeling her personality, crushed to nothing in the hug of those arms,
expand again to its full significance before the attentive immobility
of that man. "Captain Jorgenson has always looked upon me as a nuisance.
Perhaps he had made up his mind to get rid of me even against your
orders. Is he quite sane?"

She released her firm hold of that iron forearm which fell slowly
by Lingard's side. She had regained fully the possession of her
personality. There remained only a fading, slightly breathless
impression of a short flight above that earth on which her feet were
firmly