"Give me fever. Give me plague. They are diseases. One gets over them. But I am being murdered. I am being murdered by the Portuguese. The gang here downed me at last among them. I am to have my throat cut the day after tomorrow."

In the face of this passion Heyst made, with his eyebrows, a slight motion of surprise which would not have been misplaced in a drawing room. Morrison's despairing reserve had broken down. He had been wandering with a dry throat all over that miserable town of mud hovels, silent, with no soul to turn to in his distress, and positively maddened by his thoughts; and suddenly he had stumbled on a white man, figuratively and actually white for Morrison refused to accept the racial whiteness of the Portuguese officials. He let himself go for the mere relief of violent speech, his elbows planted on the table, his eyes bloodshot, his voice nearly gone, the Page 7

brim of his round pith hat shading an unshaven, livid face. His white clothes, which he had not taken off for three days, were dingy. He looked already gone to the bad, past redemption. The sight was shocking to

Heyst; but he let nothing of it appear in his bearing, concealing his impression under that consummate goodsociety manner of his. Polite attention, what's due from one gentleman listening to another, was what he showed; and, as usual, it was catching, so that Morrison pulled himself together and finished his narrative in a conversational tone, with a manoftheworld air.

"It's a villainous plot. Unluckily, one is helpless. That scoundrel Cousinho Andreas, you know has been coveting the brig for years. Naturally, I would never sell. She is not only my livelihood; she's my life.

So he has hatched this pretty little plot with the chief of the customs. The sale, of course, will be a farce.

There's no one here to bid. He will get the brig for a song no, not even that a line of a song.

You have been some years now in the islands, Heyst. You know us all; you have seen how we live. Now you shall have the opportunity to see how some of us end; for it is the end, for me. I can't deceive myself any longer. You see it don't you?"

Morrison had pulled himself together, but one felt the snapping strain on his recovered selfpossession.

Heyst was beginning to say that he "could very well see all the bearings of this unfortunate "

when

Morrison interrupted him jerkily.