I don't feel sleepy for
the moment."
"Well, don't be long."
He made no answer. She saw him standing there, very still, with a frown
on his brow, and slowly dropped the curtain.
Heyst did really light a cheroot before going out again on the veranda.
He glanced up from under the low eaves, to see by the stars how the
night went on. It was going very slowly. Why it should have irked him he
did not know, for he had nothing to expect from the dawn; but everything
round him had become unreasonable, unsettled, and vaguely urgent, laying
him under an obligation, but giving him no line of action. He felt
contemptuously irritated with the situation. The outer world had broken
upon him; and he did not know what wrong he had done to bring this on
himself, any more than he knew what he had done to provoke the horrible
calumny about his treatment of poor Morrison. For he could not forget
this. It had reached the ears of one who needed to have the most perfect
confidence in the rectitude of his conduct.
"And she only half disbelieves it," he thought, with hopeless
humiliation.
This moral stab in the back seemed to have taken some of his strength
from him, as a physical wound would have done. He had no desire to do
anything--neither to bring Wang to terms in the matter of the revolver
nor to find out from the strangers who they were, and how their
predicament had come about.
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