by the bond of an irrealisable desire, for I kept my head - quite.

And I put up with the moral discomfort of Jacobus's sleepy
watchfulness, tranquil, and yet so expressive; as if there had been

a tacit pact between us two. I put up with the insolence of the
old woman's: "Aren't you ever going to leave us in peace, my good

fellow?" with her taunts; with her brazen and sinister scolding.
She was of the true Jacobus stock, and no mistake.

Directly I got away from the girl I called myself many hard names.
What folly was this? I would ask myself. It was like being the

slave of some depraved habit. And I returned to her with my head
clear, my heart certainly free, not even moved by pity for that

castaway (she was as much of a castaway as any one ever wrecked on
a desert island), but as if beguiled by some extraordinary promise.

Nothing more unworthy could be imagined. The recollection of that
tremulous whisper when I gripped her shoulder with one hand and

held a plate of chicken with the other was enough to make me break
all my good resolutions.

Her insulting taciturnity was enough sometimes to make one gnash
one's teeth with rage. When she opened her mouth it was only to be

abominably rude in harsh tones to the associate of her reprobate
father; and the full approval of her aged relative was conveyed to

her by offensive chuckles. If not that, then her remarks, always
uttered in the tone of scathing contempt, were of the most

appalling inanity.
How could it have been otherwise? That plump, ruffianly Jacobus

old maid in the tight grey frock had never taught her any manners.
Manners I suppose are not necessary for born castaways. No

educational establishment could ever be induced to accept her as a
pupil - on account of the proprieties, I imagine. And Jacobus had

not been able to send her away anywhere. How could he have done
it? Who with? Where to? He himself was not enough of an

adventurer to think of settling down anywhere else. His passion
had tossed him at the tail of a circus up and down strange coasts,

but, the storm over, he had drifted back shamelessly where, social
outcast as he was, he remained still a Jacobus - one of the oldest

families on the island, older than the French even. There must
have been a Jacobus in at the death of the last Dodo. . . . The

girl had learned nothing, she had never listened to a general
conversation, she knew nothing, she had heard of nothing. She

could read certainly; but all the reading matter that ever came in
her way were the newspapers provided for the captains' room of the

"store." Jacobus had the habit of taking these sheets home now and
then in a very stained and ragged condition.

As her mind could not grasp the meaning of any matters treated
there except police-court reports and accounts of crimes, she had

formed for herself a notion of the civilised world as a scene of
murders, abductions, burglaries, stabbing affrays, and every sort

of desperateviolence. England and France, Paris and London (the
only two towns of which she seemed to have heard), appeared to her

sinks of abomination, reeking with blood, in contrast to her little
island where petty larceny was about the standard of current

misdeeds, with, now and then, some more pronounced crime - and that
only amongst the imported coolie labourers on sugar estates or the

negroes of the town. But in Europe these things were being done
daily by a wicked population of white men amongst whom, as that

ruffianly, aristocratic old Miss Jacobus pointed out, the wandering
sailors, the associates of her precious papa, were the lowest of

the low.
It was impossible to give her a sense of proportion. I suppose she

figured England to herself as about the size of the Pearl of the
Ocean; in which case it would certainly have been reeking with gore

and a mere wreck of burgled houses from end to end. One could not
make her understand that these horrors on which she fed her

imagination were lost in the mass of orderly life like a few drops
of blood in the ocean. She directed upon me for a moment the

uncomprehending glance of her narrowed eyes and then would turn her
scornful powdered face away without a word. She would not even

take the trouble to shrug her shoulders.
At that time the batches of papers brought by the last mail

reported a series of crimes in the East End of London, there was a
sensational case of abduction in France and a fine display of armed

robbery in Australia. One afternoon crossing the dining-room I
heard Miss Jacobus piping in the verandah with venomous animosity:

"I don't know what your precious papa is plotting with that fellow.
But he's just the sort of man who's capable of carrying you off far

away somewhere and then cutting your throat some day for your
money."

There was a good half of the length of the verandah between their
chairs. I came out and sat down fiercelymidway between them.

"Yes, that's what we do with girls in Europe," I began in a grimly
matter-of-fact tone. I think Miss Jacobus was disconcerted by my

sudden appearance. I turned upon her with cold ferocity:
"As to objectionable old women, they are first strangled quietly,

then cut up into small pieces and thrown away, a bit here and a bit
there. They vanish - "

I cannot go so far as to say I had terrified her. But she was
troubled by my truculence, the more so because I had been always

addressing her with a politeness she did not deserve. Her plump,
knitting hands fell slowly on her knees. She said not a word while

I fixed her with severedetermination. Then as I turned away from
her at last, she laid down her work gently and, with noiseless

movements, retreated from the verandah. In fact, she vanished.
But I was not thinking of her. I was looking at the girl. It was

what I was coming for daily; troubled, ashamed, eager; finding in
my nearness to her a uniquesensation which I indulged with dread,

self-contempt, and deep pleasure, as if it were a secret vice bound
to end in my undoing, like the habit of some drug or other which

ruins and degrades its slave.
I looked her over, from the top of her dishevelled head, down the

lovely line of the shoulder, following the curve of the hip, the
draped form of the long limb, right down to her fine ankle below a

torn, soiled flounce; and as far as the point of the shabby, high-
heeled, blue slipper, dangling from her well-shaped foot, which she

moved slightly, with quick, nervous jerks, as if impatient of my
presence. And in the scent of the massed flowers I seemed to

breathe her special and inexplicable charm, the heady perfume of
the everlastingly irritated captive of the garden.

I looked at her rounded chin, the Jacobus chin; at the full, red
lips pouting in the powdered, sallow face; at the firm modelling of

the cheek, the grains of white in the hairs of the straight sombre
eyebrows; at the long eyes, a narrowed gleam of liquid white and

intense motionless black, with their gaze so empty of thought, and
so absorbed in their fixity that she seemed to be staring at her

own lonely image, in some far-off mirror hidden from my sight
amongst the trees.

And suddenly, without looking at me, with the appearance of a
person speaking to herself, she asked, in that voice slightly harsh

yet mellow and always irritated:
"Why do you keep on coming here?"

"Why do I keep on coming here?" I repeated, taken by surprise. I
could not have told her. I could not even tell myself with

sincerity why I was coming there. "What's the good of you asking a
question like that?"

"Nothing is any good," she observed scornfully to the empty air,
her chin propped on her hand, that hand never extended to any man,

that no one had ever grasped - for I had only grasped her shoulder
once - that generous, fine, somewhat masculine hand. I knew well

the peculiarly" target="_blank" title="ad.特有地；古怪地">peculiarlyefficient shape - broad at the base, tapering at the
fingers - of that hand, for which there was nothing in the world to

lay hold of. I pretended to be playful.
"No! But do you really care to know?"

She shrugged indolently her magnificent shoulders, from which the
dingy thin wrapper was slipping a little.

"Oh - never mind - never mind!"