st silence of the forest
he was waiting alone, a fugitive in fear of his life. Indifferent to his
danger he was waiting for her. It was for her only that he had come; and
now as the time approached when he should have his reward, she asked
herself with dismay what meant that chilling doubt of her own will and of
her own desire? With an effort she shook off the fear of the passing
weakness. He should have his reward. Her woman's love and her woman's
honour overcame the faltering distrust of that unknown future waiting for
her in the darkness of the river.

"No, you will not return," muttered Mrs. Almayer, prophetically.

"Without you he will not go, and if he remains here--" She waved her
hand towards the lights of "Almayer's Folly," and the unfinished sentence
died out in a threatening murmur.

The two women had met behind the house, and now were walking slowly
together towards the creek where all the canoes were moored. Arrived at
the fringe of bushes they stopped by a common impulse, and Mrs. Almayer,
laying her hand on her daughter's arm, tried in vain to look close into
the girl's averted face. When she attempted to speak her first words
were lost in a stifled sob that sounded strangely coming from that woman
who, of all human passions, seemed to know only those of anger and hate.

"You are going away to be a great Ranee," she said at last, in a voice
that was steady enough now, "and if you be wise you shall have much power
that will endure many days, and even last into your old age. What have I
been? A slave all my life, and I have cooked rice for a man who had no
courage and no wisdom. Hai! I! even I, was given in gift by a chief and
a warrior to a man that was neither. Hai! Hai!"

She wailed to herself softly, lamenting the lost possibilities of murder
and mischief that could have fallen to her lot had she been mated with a
congenial spirit. Nina bent down over Mrs. Almayer's slight form and
scanned attentively, under the stars that had rushed out on the black sky
and now hung breathless over that strange parting, her mother's
shrivelled features, and looked close into the sunken eyes that could see
into her own dark future by the light of a long and a painful experience.
Again she felt herself fascinated, as of old, by her mother's exalted
mood and by the oracular certainty of expression which, together with her
fits of violence, had contributed not a little to the reputation for
witchcraft sh