s. For him, however, that was broken. He was no longer enchanted,
though he was still a captive of the islands. He had no intention to
leave them ever. Where could he have gone to, after all these years?
Not a single soul belonging to him lived anywhere on earth. Of this
fact--not such a remote one, after all--he had only lately become aware;
for it is failure that makes a man enter into himself and reckon up his
resources. And though he had made up his mind to retire from the world
in hermit fashion, yet he was irrationally moved by this sense of
loneliness which had come to him in the hour of renunciation. It hurt
him. Nothing is more painful than the shock of sharp contradictions that
lacerate our intelligence and our feelings.

Meantime Schomberg watched Heyst out of the corner of his eye.
Towards the unconscious object of his enmity he preserved a distant
lieutenant-of-the-Reserve demeanour. Nudging certain of his customers
with his elbow, he begged them to observe what airs "that Swede" was
giving himself.

"I really don't know why he has come to stay in my house. This place
isn't good enough for him. I wish to goodness he had gone somewhere else
to show off his superiority. Here I have got up this series of concerts
for you gentlemen, just to make things a little brighter generally; and
do you think he'll condescend to step in and listen to a piece or two of
an evening? Not he. I know him of old. There he sits at the dark end of
the piazza, all the evening long--planning some new swindle, no doubt.
For two-pence I would ask him to go and look for quarters somewhere
else; only one doesn't like to treat a white man like that out in the
tropics. I don't know how long he means to stay, but I'm willing to bet
a trifle that he'll never work himself up to the point of spending the
fifty cents of entrance money for the sake of a little good music."

Nobody cared to bet, or the hotel-keeper would have lost. One evening
Heyst was driven to desperation by the rasped, squeaked, scraped
snatches of tunes pursuing him even to his hard couch, with a mattress
as thin as a pancake and a diaphanous mosquito net. He descended among
the trees, where the soft glow of Japanese lanterns picked out parts of
their great rugged trunks, here and there, in the great mass of darkness
under the lofty foliage. More lanterns, of the shape of cylindrical
concertinas, hanging in a row from a slack string, decorated the doorway
of what Schomberg