ined to enter at any other time. He was distracted.
He did not know what he was doing. You could have led him over the edge
of a precipice just as easily as into that wine-shop. He sat down like
an automaton. He was speechless, but he saw a glass full of rough red
wine before him, and emptied it. Heyst meantime, politely watchful, had
taken a seat opposite.

"You are in for a bout of fever, I fear," he said sympathetically.

Poor Morrison's tongue was loosened at that.

"Fever!" he cried. "Give me fever. Give me plague. They are diseases.
One gets over them. But I am being murdered. I am being murdered by the
Portuguese. The gang here downed me at last among them. I am to have my
throat cut the day after tomorrow."

In the face of this passion Heyst made, with his eyebrows, a
slight motion of surprise which would not have been misplaced in a
drawing-room. Morrison's despairing reserve had broken down. He had been
wandering with a dry throat all over that miserable town of mud hovels,
silent, with no soul to turn to in his distress, and positively
maddened by his thoughts; and suddenly he had stumbled on a white man,
figuratively and actually white--for Morrison refused to accept the
racial whiteness of the Portuguese officials. He let himself go for the
mere relief of violent speech, his elbows planted on the table, his
eyes blood-shot, his voice nearly gone, the brim of his round pith hat
shading an unshaven, livid face. His white clothes, which he had not
taken off for three days, were dingy. He had already gone to the bad,
past redemption. The sight was shocking to Heyst; but he let nothing
of it appear in his hearing, concealing his impression under that
consummate good-society manner of his. Polite attention, what's due from
one gentleman listening to another, was what he showed; and, as usual,
it was catching; so that Morrison pulled himself together and finished
his narrative in a conversational tone, with a man-of-the-world air.

"It's a villainous plot. Unluckily, one is helpless. That scoundrel
Cousinho--Andreas, you know--has been coveting the brig for years.
Naturally, I would never sell. She is not only my livelihood; she's my
life. So he has hatched this pretty little plot with the chief of the
customs. The sale, of course, will be a farce. There's no one here to
bid. He will get the brig for a song--no, not even that--a line of a
song. You have been some years now in the islands, Heyst. You know us
a