never seen the dark side of her father; she had
never loved him in the true sense of the word, but she had respected him
and felt a pride in his strength and dominance.

The man who had returned from Africa seemed to her an inferior being; the
wreck, in fact, of the man she had always known.

"And this happened to him," said she, "when he was trying to save a
servant's life?"

"Ah," said Adams, "if you could have seen it, you would have called it
something even higher than that--it was a sublime act."

He told her the details, even as he had told them to Schaunard, but with
additions.

"I myself was paralyzed--I could only cling to the tree and watch. The
fury of that storm of beasts coming down on one was like a wind--I can put
it no other way--like a wind that stripped one's mind of everything but
just the power of sight. I can imagine now the last day, when the sun
shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood. It was as bad as
that--well, _he_ did not lose his mind or nerve, he found time to think of
the man who was lying drugged with hemp, and he found courage enough in
his heart to attempt to save him. He was fond of the man, for the man was
a great hunter though an absolute savage, without heart or soul.

"Without heart or soul----" Adams paused. There was something about Maxine
Berselius that made her different from the ordinary woman one meets in
life--some inheritance from her father, perhaps, who knows? But through
the sweetness of her nature which spoke in voice and expression, through
her loveliness and her womanliness, there shone a light from within. Like
the gleam from the lamp that lives in an opal, this mind-brightness of
Maxine's pierced the clouds of her beauty capriciously, now half-veiled,
now shining forth. It was the light of that flame which men call
originality. Maxine saw the world by the light of her own lamp. Adams,
though he had seen far more of the world than she, had seen it by the
light of other people's lamps.

The Hostage House of Yandjali would have told Maxine infinitely more than
it told Adams. She would have read in Meeus's face a story that he never
deciphered; she would have seen in the people of the Silent Pools a whole
nation in chains, when he with his other-people-begotten ideas of niggers
and labour only saw a few recalcitrant blacks. It wanted skulls and bones
to bring him to a sense of the sorrow around him; the sight of these
people would have told Maxine