"Yes," said Willems, holding her eyes with his in a sense of extreme
effort, "Yes, I am white." Then he added, feeling as if he spoke about
some other man, "But I am the outcast of my people."

She listened to him gravely. Through the mesh of scattered hair her
face looked like the face of a golden statue with living eyes. The heavy
eyelids dropped slightly, and from between the long eyelashes she sent
out a sidelong look: hard, keen, and narrow, like the gleam of sharp
steel. Her lips were firm and composed in a graceful curve, but the
distended nostrils, the upward poise of the half-averted head, gave to
her whole person the expression of a wild and resentful defiance.

A shadow passed over Willems' face. He put his hand over his lips as if
to keep back the words that wanted to come out in a surge of impulsive
necessity, the outcome of dominant thought that rushes from the heart to
the brain and must be spoken in the face of doubt, of danger, of fear,
of destruction itself.

"You are beautiful," he whispered.

She looked at him again with a glance that running in one quick flash of
her eyes over his sunburnt features, his broad shoulders, his straight,
tall, motionless figure, rested at last on the ground at his feet. Then
she smiled. In the sombre beauty of her face that smile was like the
first ray of light on a stormy daybreak that darts evanescent and pale
through the gloomy clouds: the forerunner of sunrise and of thunder.



CHAPTER SEVEN