"Well, don't try. I know him. Don't try," advised the master,
and, bending again over his desk, his staring bloodshot eyes

close to the paper, he would go on tracing laboriously with his
thick fingers the slim unsteady letters of his correspondence,

while Willems waited respectfully for his further good pleasure
before asking, with great deference--

"Any orders, Mr. Hudig?"
"Hm! yes. Go to Bun-Hin yourself and see the dollars of that

payment counted and packed, and have them put on board the
mail-boat for Ternate. She's due here this afternoon."

"Yes, Mr. Hudig."
"And, look here. If the boat is late, leave the case in

Bun-Hin's godown till to-morrow. Seal it up. Eight seals as
usual. Don't take it away till the boat is here."

"No, Mr. Hudig."
"And don't forget about these opium cases. It's for to-night.

Use my own boatmen. Transship them from the Caroline to the Arab
barque," went on the master in his hoarse undertone. "And don't

you come to me with another story of a case dropped overboard
like last time," he added, with sudden ferocity, looking up at

his confidential clerk.
"No, Mr. Hudig. I will take care."

"That's all. Tell that pig as you go out that if he doesn't make
the punkah go a little better I will break every bone in his

body," finished up Hudig, wiping his purple face with a red silk
handkerchief nearly as big as a counterpane.

Noiselessly Willems went out, shutting carefully behind him the
little green door through which he passed to the warehouse.

Hudig, pen in hand, listened to him bullying the punkah boy with
profane violence, born of unbounded zeal for the master's

comfort, before he returned to his writing amid the rustling of
papers fluttering in the wind sent down by the punkah that waved

in wide sweeps above his head.
Willems would nod familiarly to Mr. Vinck, who had his desk close

to the little door of the private office, and march down the
warehouse with an important air. Mr. Vinck--extreme dislike

lurking in every wrinkle of his gentlemanly countenance--would
follow with his eyes the white figure flitting in the gloom

amongst the piles of bales and cases till it passed out through
the big archway into the glare of the street.

CHAPTER THREE
The opportunity and the temptation were too much for Willems, and

under the pressure of sudden necessity he abused that trust which
was his pride, the perpetual sign of his cleverness and a load

too heavy for him to carry. A run of bad luck at cards, the
failure of a small speculation undertaken on his own account, an

unexpected demand for money from one or another member of the Da
Souza family--and almost before he was well aware of it he was

off the path of his peculiarhonesty. It was such a faint and
ill-defined track that it took him some time to find out how far

he had strayed amongst the brambles of the dangerous wilderness
he had been skirting for so many years, without any other guide

than his own convenience and that doctrine of success which he
had found for himself in the book of life--in those interesting

chapters that the Devil has been permitted to write in it, to
test the sharpness of men's eyesight and the steadfastness of

their hearts. For one short, dark and solitary moment he was
dismayed, but he had that courage that will not scale heights,

yet will wade bravely through the mud--if there be no other road.
He applied himself to the task of restitution, and devoted

himself to the duty of not being found out. On his thirtieth
birthday he had almost accomplished the task--and the duty had

been faithfully and cleverly performed. He saw himself safe.
Again he could look hopefully towards the goal of his legitimate

ambition. Nobody would dare to suspect him, and in a few days
there would be nothing to suspect. He was elated. He did not

know that his prosperity had touched then its high-water mark,
and that the tide was already on the turn.

Two days afterwards he knew. Mr. Vinck, hearing the rattle of
the door-handle, jumped up from his desk--where he had been

tremulously listening to the loud voices in the private
office--and buried his face in the big safe with nervous haste.

For the last time Willems passed through the little green door
leading to Hudig's sanctum, which, during the past half-hour,

might have been taken--from the fiendish noise within--for the
cavern of some wild beast. Willems' troubled eyes took in the

quick impression of men and things as he came out from the place
of his humiliation. He saw the scared expression of the punkah

boy; the Chinamen tellers sitting on their heels with unmovable
faces turned up blankly towards him while their arrested hands

hovered over the little piles of bright guilders ranged on the
floor; Mr. Vinck's shoulder-blades with the fleshy rims of two

red ears above. He saw the long avenue of gin cases stretching
from where he stood to the archeddoorway beyond which he would

be able to breathe perhaps. A thin rope's end lay across his
path and he saw it distinctly, yet stumbled heavily over it as if

it had been a bar of iron. Then he found himself in the street
at last, but could not find air enough to fill his lungs. He

walked towards his home, gasping.
As the sound of Hudig's insults that lingered in his ears grew

fainter by the lapse of time, the feeling of shame was replaced
slowly by a passion of anger against himself and still more

against the stupid concourse of circumstances that had driven him
into his idiotic indiscretion. Idiotic indiscretion; that is how

he defined his guilt to himself. Could there be anything worse
from the point of view of his undeniable cleverness? What a

fatal aberration of an acute mind! He did not recognize himself
there. He must have been mad. That's it. A sudden gust of

madness. And now the work of long years was destroyed utterly.
What would become of him?

Before he could answer that question he found himself in the
garden before his house, Hudig's wedding gift. He looked at it

with a vague surprise to find it there. His past was so utterly
gone from him that the dwelling which belonged to it appeared to

him incongruous standing there intact, neat, and cheerful in the
sunshine of the hot afternoon. The house was a pretty little

structure all doors and windows, surrounded on all sides by the
deep verandah supported on slender columns clothed in the green

foliage of creepers, which also fringed the overhanging eaves of
the high-pitched roof. Slowly, Willems mounted the dozen steps

that led to the verandah. He paused at every step. He must tell
his wife. He felt frightened at the prospect, and his alarm

dismayed him. Frightened to face her! Nothing could give him a
better measure of the greatness of the change around him, and in

him. Another man--and another life with the faith in himself
gone. He could not be worth much if he was afraid to face that

woman.
He dared not enter the house through the open door of the

dining-room, but stood irresolute by the little work-table where
trailed a white piece of calico, with a needle stuck in it, as if

the work had been left hurriedly. The pink-crested cockatoo
started, on his appearance, into clumsy activity and began to

climb laboriously up and down his perch, calling "Joanna" with
indistinct loudness and a persistentscreech that prolonged the

last syllable of the name as if in a peal of insane laughter.
The screen in the doorway moved gently once or twice in the

breeze, and each time Willems started slightly, expecting his
wife, but he never lifted his eyes, although straining his ears

for the sound of her footsteps. Gradually he lost himself in his
thoughts, in the endless speculation as to the manner in which

she would receive his news--and his orders. In this
preoccupationhe almost forgot the fear of her presence. No doubt