"Then I'll send my report direct to the governor, and mark it confidential at your request." That night the commandant, lying under his mosquito net, wakeful from prickly heat, was haunted by the face of Lawrence Teck. "She must be very beautiful," he sighed. "Why didn't they print her picture?" And he occupied himself with trying to imagine what she looked like. By the time he was falling asleep he had decided that she must have yellow hair and large, blue eyes. Just as he dozed off he had a ravishing impression of her--a composite of an Austrian arch-duchess, whose likeness he had admired in a periodical, and a Neapolitan singer who had overwhelmed him in a music hall at home, long ago, when the world had seemed a place stored with love, fame, and wealth, instead of with prickly heat, malaria, and shiny, black faces. "My angel!" breathed the poor commandant of Fort Pero d'Anhaya, sleeping for the first time in many a night with an infantile smile on his countenance that suggested a half-deflated balloon. CHAPTER XXXIX Hamoud, wearing the blue robe edged with gold embroidery, and carrying in his right hand the Venetian goblet, was half-way out of the living-room when David Verne resumed: "No, you must really go about more, or you will begin to hate me." The young Arab paused beyond the living-room door, his handsome head inclined to one side, waiting for the response--not for the words, but for the mere tone of her voice. He heard: "While you are holding your own, and working so well, I am happy." Hamoud closed his eyes, in order to let those silvery vibrations occupy his whole consciousness. Then, staring before him, he went swiftly across the wainscotted hall with his lithe, noiseless step, escaping before that other voice could break the spell. David Verne, in his wheel chair that stood beside a tall lamp, gave her a furtive look, before continuing: "Is it always happiness that I discover on your face? Is that what you show me when you raise your eyes blankly from some book, or return from the garden after those lonely walks of yours in the twilight? Or is it pity, not only for me, but also for yourself? Is it then that you see clearly what you've let yourself in for--what that divine impulse of yours has brought you to?" "David!" she protested, her nerves contracting at this threat of a scene that must lacerate both their hearts. But he persisted: "I don't disbelieve what you told me about Rysbroek. It's not he that I'm jealous of. I can even believe that there's no other living man in your thoughts. The powers that I can never hope to conquer don't have to exist in the present, in order to frighten me. They have only to exist in the past and in the future. Of course the man who is dead will always triumph over me by comparison. And some day, since mortals are bound to strive for a duplication of their happiest moments, another will appear to promise you that duplication."