.
"For three days she wouldn't give me any peace. She was never still. She
planned ambushes. She has been looking for places all over here where I
could hide and drop you with a safe shot as you walked up. It's true. I
give you my word."

"Your word," muttered Lingard, contemptuously.

Willems took no notice.

"Ah! She is a ferocious creature," he went on. "You don't know . . .
I wanted to pass the time--to do something--to have something to think
about--to forget my troubles till you came back. And . . . look at her
. . . she took me as if I did not belong to myself. She did. I did not
know there was something in me she could get hold of. She, a savage.
I, a civilized European, and clever! She that knew no more than a wild
animal! Well, she found out something in me. She found it out, and I
was lost. I knew it. She tormented me. I was ready to do anything. I
resisted--but I was ready. I knew that too. That frightened me more than
anything; more than my own sufferings; and that was frightful enough, I
assure you."

Lingard listened, fascinated and amazed like a child listening to a
fairy tale, and, when Willems stopped for breath, he shuffled his feet a
little.

"What does he say?" cried out Aissa, suddenly.

The two men looked at her quickly, and then looked at one another.

Willems began again, speaking hurriedly--

"I tried to do something. Take her away from those people. I went
to Almayer; the biggest blind fool that you ever . . . Then Abdulla
came--and she went away. She took away with her something of me which I
had to get back. I had to do it. As far as you are concerned, the change
here had to happen sooner or later; you couldn't be master here for
ever. It isn't what I have done that torments me. It is the why. It's
the madness that drove me to it. It's that thing that came over me. That
may come again, some day."

"It will do no harm to anybody then, I promise you," said Lingard,
significantly.

Willems looked at him for a second with a blank stare, then went on--

"I fought against her. She goaded me to violence and to murder. Nobody
knows why. She pushed me to it persistently, desperately, all the time.
Fortunately Abdulla had sense. I don't know what I wouldn't have done.
She held me then. Held me like a nightmare that is terrible and sweet.
By and by it was another life. I woke up. I found myself beside an
animal as full of harm as a wild cat. You don't know through what I have
passed. Her