tchwoman push the canoe?
I lay hidden in the grass and heard all the words. She that we used to
call the white Mem wanted to return to look at your face, but the
witchwoman forbade her, and--"

She sank lower yet on her elbow, turning half round under the downward
push of the heavy hand, her face lifted up to him with spiteful eyes.

"And she obeyed," she shouted out in a half-laugh, half-cry of pain. "Let
me go, Tuan. Why are you angry with me? Hasten, or you shall be too
late to show your anger to the deceitful woman."

Almayer dragged her up to her feet and looked close into her face while
she struggled, turning her head away from his wild stare.

"Who sent you here to torment me?" he asked, violently. "I do not
believe you. You lie."

He straightened his arm suddenly and flung her across the verandah
towards the doorway, where she lay immobile and silent, as if she had
left her life in his grasp, a dark heap, without a sound or a stir.

"Oh! Nina!" whispered Almayer, in a voice in which reproach and love
spoke together in pained tenderness. "Oh! Nina! I do not believe."

A light draught from the river ran over the courtyard in a wave of bowing
grass and, entering the verandah, touched Almayer's forehead with its
cool breath, in a caress of infinite pity. The curtain in the women's
doorway blew out and instantly collapsed with startling helplessness. He
stared at the fluttering stuff.

"Nina!" cried Almayer. "Where are you, Nina?"

The wind passed out of the empty house in a tremulous sigh, and all was
still.

Almayer hid his face in his hands as if to shut out a loathsome sight.
When, hearing a slight rustle, he uncovered his eyes, the dark heap by
the door was gone.

CHAPTER XI.

In the middle of a shadowless square of moonlight, shining on a smooth
and level expanse of young rice-shoots, a little shelter-hut perched on
high posts, the pile of brushwood near by and the glowing embers of a
fire with a man stretched before it, seemed very small and as if lost in
the pale green iridescence reflected from the ground. On three sides of
the clearing, appearing very far away in the deceptive light, the big
trees of the forest, lashed together with manifold bonds by a mass of
tangled creepers, looked down at the growing young life at their feet
with the sombre resignation of giants that had lost faith in their
strength. And in the midst of them the merciless creepers clung to the
big t