ou wouldn't have found as much as a heap of ashes had I
liked. I could have done all that. And I wouldn't."

"You--could--not. You dared not. You scoundrel!" cried Lingard.

"What's the use of calling me names?"

"True," retorted Lingard--"there's no name bad enough for you."

There was a short interval of silence. At the sound of their rapidly
exchanged words, Aissa had got up from the ground where she had been
sitting, in a sorrowful and dejected pose, and approached the two men.
She stood on one side and looked on eagerly, in a desperate effort of
her brain, with the quick and distracted eyes of a person trying for her
life to penetrate the meaning of sentences uttered in a foreign
tongue: the meaning portentous and fateful that lurks in the sounds of
mysterious words; in the sounds surprising, unknown and strange.

Willems let the last speech of Lingard pass by; seemed by a slight
movement of his hand to help it on its way to join the other shadows of
the past. Then he said--

"You have struck me; you have insulted me . . ."

"Insulted you!" interrupted Lingard, passionately. "Who--what can insult
you . . . you . . ."

He choked, advanced a step.

"Steady! steady!" said Willems calmly. "I tell you I sha'n't fight. Is
it clear enough to you that I sha'n't? I--shall--not--lift--a--finger."

As he spoke, slowly punctuating each word with a slight jerk of his
head, he stared at Lingard, his right eye open and big, the left small
and nearly closed by the swelling of one half of his face, that appeared
all drawn out on one side like faces seen in a concave glass. And they
stood exactly opposite each other: one tall, slight and disfigured; the
other tall, heavy and severe.

Willems went on--

"If I had wanted to hurt you--if I had wanted to destroy you, it was
easy. I stood in the doorway long enough to pull a trigger--and you know
I shoot straight."

"You would have missed," said Lingard, with assurance. "There is, under
heaven, such a thing as justice."

The sound of that word on his own lips made him pause, confused, like an
unexpected and unanswerable rebuke. The anger of his outraged pride,
the anger of his outraged heart, had gone out in the blow; and there
remained nothing but the sense of some immense infamy--of something
vague, disgusting and terrible, which seemed to surround him on all
sides, hover about him with shadowy and stealthy movements, like a band
of assassins in the darkness of vast an