e watchers perched in the highest boughs of the big tree made a
slight rustle amongst the leaves.

"What are you thinking of, Captain Lingard?" d'Alcacer asked in a low
voice. Lingard did not change his position.

"I am trying to keep it off," he said in the same tone.

"What? Trying to keep thought off?"

"Yes."

"Is this the time for such experiments?" asked d'Alcacer.

"Why not? It's my reprieve. Don't grudge it to me, Mr. d'Alcacer."

"Upon my word I don't. But isn't it dangerous?"

"You will have to take your chance."

D'Alcacer had a moment of internal struggle. He asked himself whether he
should tell Lingard that Mrs. Travers had come to the stockade with some
sort of message from Jorgenson. He had it on the tip of his tongue
to advise Lingard to go and see Mrs. Travers and ask her point blank
whether she had anything to tell him; but before he could make up
his mind the voices of invisible men high up in the tree were heard
reporting the thinning of the fog. This caused a stir to run along the
four sides of the stockade.

Lingard felt the draught of air in his face, the motionless mist began
to drive over the palisades and, suddenly, the lagoon came into view
with a great blinding glitter of its wrinkled surface and the faint
sound of its wash rising all along the shore. A multitude of hands went
up to shade the eager eyes, and exclamations of wonder burst out from
many men at the sight of a crowd of canoes of various sizes and kinds
lying close together with the effect as of an enormous raft, a little
way off the side of the Emma. The excited voices rose higher and higher.
There was no doubt about Tengga's being on the lagoon. But what was
Jorgenson about? The Emma lay as if abandoned by her keeper and her
crew, while the mob of mixed boats seemed to be meditating an attack.

For all his determination to keep thought off to the very last possible
moment, Lingard could not defend himself from a sense of wonder and
fear. What was Jorgenson about? For a moment Lingard expected the side
of the Emma to wreath itself in puffs of smoke, but an age seemed to
elapse without the sound of a shot reaching his ears.

The boats were afraid to close. They were hanging off, irresolute; but
why did Jorgenson not put an end to their hesitation by a volley or
two of musketry if only over their heads? Through the anguish of his
perplexity Lingard found himself returning to life, to mere life with
its sense of pain an