“Dick goes away alone,” she said.  “He stains his skin and goes away at night.  He tells me that he must, that it’s the only way by which he can know the natives, and that so it’s a sort of duty.  He says the black tells nothing of himself to the white man—­ever.  You must go amongst them if you are to know them.  So he goes, and I never know when he will come back.  I never know whether he will come back.”

“But he has done that sort of thing on and off for years, and he has always come back,” replied Walker.

“Yes, but one day he will not.”  Walker comforted her as well as he could, praised Hatteras for his conduct, though his heart was hot against him, spoke of risks that every one must run who serve the Empire.  “Never a lotus closes, you know,” he said, and went back to the factory with the consciousness that he had been telling lies.

It was no sense of duty that prompted Hatteras, of that he was certain, and he waited—­he waited from darkness to daybreak in his compound for three successive nights.  On the fourth he heard the scuffling sound at the corner of the fence.  The night was black as the inside of a coffin.  Half a regiment of men might steal past him and he not have seen them.  Accordingly he walked cautiously to the palisade which separated the enclosure of the Residency from his own, felt along it until he reached the little gate and stationed himself in front of it.  In a few moments he thought that he heard a man breathing, but whether to the right or the left he could not tell; and then a groping hand lightly touched his face and drew away again.  Walker said nothing, but held his breath and did not move.  The hand was stretched out again.  This time it touched his breast and moved across it until it felt a button of Walker’s coat.  Then it was snatched away and Walker heard a gasping in-draw of the breath and afterwards a sound as of a man turning in a flurry.  Walker sprang forward and caught a naked shoulder with one hand, a naked arm with the other.

“Wait a bit, Dick Hatteras,” he said.

There was a low cry, and then a husky voice addressed him respectfully as “Daddy” in trade-English.

“That won’t do, Dick,” said Walker.

The voice babbled more trade-English.

“If you’re not Dick Hatteras,” continued Walker, tightening his grasp, “You’ve no manner of right here.  I’ll give you till I count ten and then I shall shoot.”

Walker counted up to nine aloud and then—­

“Jim,” said Hatteras in his natural voice.

“That’s better,” said Walker.  “Let’s go in and talk.”

III.

He went up the step and lighted the lamp.  Hatteras followed him and the two men faced one another.  For a little while neither of them spoke.  Walker was repeating to himself that this man with the black skin, naked except for a dirty loincloth and a few feathers on his head was a white man married to a white wife who was sleeping—­Nay, more likely crying—­not thirty yards away.