Page:'Twixt land and sea - tales (IA twixtlandseatale00conr).pdf/219

 Freya thought: “I mustn't let him provoke me.” Presently the Tamil boy, who was Nelson’s head servant, came in with the lights. She addressed him at once with voluble directions where to put the lamps, told him to bring the tray with the gin and bitters, and to send Antonia into the house.

“I will have to leave you to yourself, Mr. Heemskirk, for a while,” she said.

And she went to her room to put on another frock. She made a quick change of it because she wished to be on the verandah before her father and the lieutenant met again. She relied on herself to regulate that evening’s intercourse between these two. But Antonia, still scared and hysterical, exhibited a bruise on her arm which roused Freya's indignation.

“He jumped on me out of the bush like a tiger,” said the girl, laughing nervously with frightened eyes.

“The brute!” thought Freya. “He meant to spy on us, then.” She was enraged, but the recollection of the thick Dutchman in white trousers wide at the hips and narrow at the ankles, with his shoulder-straps and black bullet head, glaring at her in the light of the lamps, was so repulsively comical that she could not help a smiling grimace. Then she became anxious. The absurdities of three men were forcing this anxiety upon her; Jasper’s impetuosity, her father’s fears, Heemskirk’s infatuation. She was very tender to the first two, and she made up her mind to display all her feminine diplomacy. All this, she said to herself, will be over and done with before very long now.

Heemskirk on the verandah, lolling in a chair, his