figure, in passing it very close, as if to drop a word into its ear.
Her lips did certainly move. But what sort of word could it have been
to make the girl jump up so swiftly? Heyst, at his table, was surprised
into a sympathetic start. He glanced quickly round. Nobody was looking
towards the platform; and when his eyes swept back there again, the
girl, with the big woman treading at her heels, was coming down the
three steps from the platform to the floor of the hall. There she
paused, stumbled one pace forward, and stood still again, while
the other--the escort, the dragoon, the coarse big woman of the
piano--passed her roughly, and, marching truculently down the centre
aisle between the chairs and tables, went out to rejoin the hook-nosed
Zangiacomo somewhere outside. During her extraordinary transit, as if
everything in the hall were dirt under her feet, her scornful eyes met
the upward glance of Heyst, who looked away at once towards the girl.
She had not moved. Her arms hung down; her eyelids were lowered.

Heyst laid down his half-smoked cigar and compressed his lips. Then he
got up. It was the same sort of impulse which years ago had made him
cross the sandy street of the abominable town of Delli in the island of
Timor and accost Morrison, practically a stranger to him then, a man in
trouble, expressively harassed, dejected, lonely.

It was the same impulse. But he did not recognize it. He was not
thinking of Morrison then. It may be said that, for the first time
since the final abandonment of the Samburan coal mine, he had completely
forgotten the late Morrison. It is true that to a certain extent he
had forgotten also where he was. Thus, unchecked by any sort of self
consciousness, Heyst walked up the central passage.

Several of the women, by this time, had found anchorage here and there