PART V. THE POINT OF HONOUR AND THE POINT OF PASSION
I
"May I come in?"
"Yes," said a voice within. "The door is open." It had a wooden latch.
Mr. Travers lifted it while the voice of his wife continued as he
entered. "Did you imagine I had locked myself in? Did you ever know me
lock myself in?"
Mr. Travers closed the door behind him. "No, it has never come to that,"
he said in a tone that was not conciliatory. In that place which was a
room in a wooden hut and had a square opening without glass but with a
half-closed shutter he could not distinguish his wife very well at once.
She was sitting in an armchair and what he could see best was her
fair hair all loose over the back of the chair. There was a moment
of silence. The measured footsteps of two men pacing athwart the
quarter-deck of the dead ship Emma commanded by the derelict shade of
Jorgenson could be heard outside.
Jorgenson, on taking up his dead command, had a house of thin boards
built on the after deck for his own accommodation and that of Lingard
during his flying visits to the Shore of Refuge. A narrow passage
divided it in two and Lingard's side was furnished with a camp bedstead,
a rough desk, and a rattan armchair. On one of his visits Lingard had
brought with him a black seaman's chest and left it there.
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