ey had never been
out before during the hottest hours. It would do her no good, he feared.
This solicitude pleased and soothed her. She felt more and more like
herself--a poor London girl playing in an orchestra, and snatched out
from the humiliations, the squalid dangers of a miserable existence,
by a man like whom there was not, there could not be, another in this
world. She felt this with elation, with uneasiness, with an intimate
pride--and with a peculiar sinking of the heart.

"I am not easily knocked out by any such thing as heat," she said
decisively.

"Yes, but I don't forget that you're not a tropical bird."

"You weren't born in these parts, either," she returned.

"No, and perhaps I haven't even your physique. I am a transplanted
being. Transplanted! I ought to call myself uprooted--an unnatural state
of existence; but a man is supposed to stand anything."

She looked back at him and received a smile. He told her to keep in the
shelter of the forest path, which was very still and close, full of heat
if free from glare. Now and then they had glimpses of the company's old
clearing blazing with light, in which the black stumps of trees stood
charred, without shadows, miserable and sinister. They crossed the open
in a direct line for the bungalow. On the veranda they fancied they had
a glimpse of the vanishing Wang, though the girl was not at all sure
that she had seen anything move. Heyst had no doubts.

"Wang has been looking out for us. We are late."

"Was he? I thought I saw something white for a moment, and then I did
not see it any more."

"That's it--he vanishes. It's a very remarkable gift in that Chinaman."

"Are they all like that?" she asked with naive curiosity and uneasiness.

"Not in such perfection," said Heyst, amused.

He noticed with approval that she was not heated by the walk. The drops
of perspiration on her forehead were like dew on the cool, white petal
of a flower. He looked at her figure of grace and strength, solid and
supple, with an ever-growing appreciation.

"Go in and rest yourself for a quarter of an hour; and then Mr. Wang
will give us something to eat," he said.

They had found the table laid. When they came together again and sat
down to it, Wang materialized without a sound, unheard, uncalled, and
did his office. Which being accomplished, at a given moment he was not.

A great silence brooded over Samburan--the silence of the great heat
that seems pregnant with