then they were peaceful again.

Chapter XXI

Thanks to Mr. Flushing's discipline, the right stages of the river were
reached at the right hours, and when next morning after breakfast the
chairs were again drawn out in a semicircle in the bow, the launch
was within a few miles of the native camp which was the limit of the
journey. Mr. Flushing, as he sat down, advised them to keep their eyes
fixed on the left bank, where they would soon pass a clearing, and in
that clearing, was a hut where Mackenzie, the famous explorer, had
died of fever some ten years ago, almost within reach of
civilisation--Mackenzie, he repeated, the man who went farther inland
than any one's been yet. Their eyes turned that way obediently. The eyes
of Rachel saw nothing. Yellow and green shapes did, it is true, pass
before them, but she only knew that one was large and another small;
she did not know that they were trees. These directions to look here
and there irritated her, as interruptions irritate a person absorbed in
thought, although she was not thinking of anything. She was annoyed with
all that was said, and with the aimless movements of people's bodies,
because they seemed to interfere with her and to prevent her from
speaking to Terence. Very soon Helen saw her staring moodily at a coil
of rope, and making no effort to listen. Mr. Flushing and St. John were
engaged in more or less continuous conversation about the future of the
country from a political point of view, and the degree to which it
had been explored; the others, with their legs stretched out, or chins
poised on the hands, gazed in silence.

Mrs. Ambrose looked and listened obediently enough, but inwardly she
was prey to an uneasy mood not readily to be ascribed to any one cause.
Looking on shore as Mr. Flushing bade her, she thought the country
very beautiful, but also sultry and alarming. She did not like to feel
herself the victim of unclassified emotions, and certainly as the launch
slipped on and on, in the hot morning sun, she felt herself unreasonably
moved. Whether the unfamiliarity of the forest was the cause of it,
or something less definite, she could not determine. Her mind left the
scene and occupied itself with anxieties for Ridley, for her children,
for far-off things, such as old age and poverty and death. Hirst, too,
was depressed. He had been looking forward to this expedition as to a
holiday, for, once away from the hotel, surely wonderful things