lay useless and barren the seeds of all love and of all hate, the
possibilities of all passions and of all sacrifices, forgot its joys and
its sufferings when deprived of the help of the senses. Her half-formed,
savage mind, the slave of her body--as her body was the slave of
another's will--forgot the faint and vague image of the ideal that had
found its beginning in the physical promptings of her savage nature. She
dropped back into the torpor of her former life and found
consolation--even a certain kind of happiness--in the thought that now
Nina and Dain were separated, probably for ever. He would forget. This
thought soothed the last pangs of dying jealousy that had nothing now to
feed upon, and Taminah found peace. It was like the dreary tranquillity
of a desert, where there is peace only because there is no life.

And now he had returned. She had recognised his voice calling aloud in
the night for Bulangi. She had crept out after her master to listen
closer to the intoxicating sound. Dain was there, in a boat, talking to
Bulangi. Taminah, listening with arrested breath, heard another voice.
The maddening joy, that only a second before she thought herself
incapable of containing within her fast-beating heart, died out, and left
her shivering in the old anguish of physical pain that she had suffered
once before at the sight of Dain and Nina. Nina spoke now, ordering and
entreating in turns, and Bulangi was refusing, expostulating, at last
consenting. He went in to take a paddle from the heap lying behind the
door. Outside the murmur of two voices went on, and she caught a word
here and there. She understood that he was fleeing from white men, that
he was seeking a hiding-place, that he was in some danger. But she heard
also words which woke the rage of jealousy that had been asleep for so
many days in her bosom. Crouching low on the mud in the black darkness
amongst the piles, she heard the whisper in the boat that made light of
toil, of privation, of danger, of life itself, if in exchange there could