Jason felt dizzy, and under the hard tan of his skin his face grew white.
"You should know him, though. No? Well, after old Jorgen had quarrelled with him, everybody said he was a kind of bastard brother of yours."
The reeking place had got hotter and hotter. It was now stifling, and Jason stumbled out into the street.
Michael Sunlocks was the new Governor, and Michael Sunlocks was about to be married to Greeba. Thrice had this man robbed him of his blessing, standing in the place that ought to have been his; once with his father, once with Greeba, and once again with Jorgen Jorgensen.
He tried to reckon it all up, but do what he would he could not keep his mind from wandering. The truth had fallen upon him at a blow, and under his strong emotions his faculties seemed to be slain in a moment. He felt blind, and deaf, and unable to think. Presently, without knowing where he was going, but impelled by some blind force, and staggering along like a drunken man, he found himself approaching the Bishop's Palace.
"He is there," he thought: "the man who has stood in my place all his days: the man who has stripped me of every good thing in life. He is there, in honor, and wealth, and happiness; and I am here, a homeless outcast in the night. Oh, that I could do it now—now—now!"
But at that he remembered that he had never yet seen Michael Sunlocks, to know him from another man. "I must wait," he thought. "I must go to work cautiously. I must see him first, and watch him."
The night was then far spent towards midnight; the streets had grown quiet, the lights of the town no longer sent a yellow glare over the grass-clad housetops, and from a quiet sky the moon and stars shone out.
Jason was turning back towards his lodgings when he heard a voice that made him stand. It was a woman's voice singing, and it came with the undertones of some string instrument from the house in front of him. After a moment he pushed the gate open and walked across the little grass plat until he came beneath the only window from which a light still shone. There he stopped and listened, laying his hand on the sill to steady himself.
Ah! now he knew the voice too well. It was Greeba's. She was there; she was on the other side of that wall at that instant. And she was singing. It was a love-song that she sang. Her very heart seemed to speak in it, for her tones were the tones of love, and he must be beside her.