Edward Alden Jewell

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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
A GRAVE WITH FLOWERS IN THE JUNGLE

I

It was a new phase of life entirely. The Star of Troy was not the Skipping Goone; yet was, in her way, quite as romantic. Jerome had a feeling from the very first that the Star of Troy wasn’t altogether a typical tramp freighter. She possessed a most remarkable captain, for one thing, and a most remarkable captain’s daughter. Also there seemed something cryptic about her whole destiny. The Skipping Goone had always seemed like a nice, plump, amiable, sensible old lady, whereas about the Star of Troy there was something ageless, lithe, and alert, something unfathomable: the very rush of water under her bow had a mysterious thrill behind it. Here was a bow accustomed to explore strange waters. Yes, the two craft were wholly alien creatures. Yet Jerome found the subtler atmosphere of the taciturn, drab tramp no less alluring. In place of the swishing sails and the comfortable strain of rigging there was now the rhythmic plod of an engine. He grew to love it. By all means there was a wealth of romance here, if of a less garrulous and gypsy sort, and the former clerk responded to it keenly—though soberly, too, for the old Jerome was no more.

His talks with Captain Utterbourne held for him the fascination of a piece of strange, vivid fiction. What a mine the man was; what a life he lived! As for his life, no one but Utterbourne himself could really know the full richness of it, since with no one did he choose to share it save in flashes and fractions.

The talk now largely centered about the project of the new Mediterranean experiment. But Jerome felt that although the Captain might appear for a moment wholly engrossed in it, even this venture, important and daring, even, as it might seem, was but one venture out of a score, perhaps, with which his brilliant mind was ever busy.

The evenings were rich and unforgettable, with the Star of Troy slipping so steadily on through tropic seas and the little white cabin, with the map of the world covering all one wall, so cheerful and bright. They would gather here after dinner: Utterbourne, Elsa, Jerome, and usually one or two of Utterbourne’s men—Sutherland or Sargeant or maybe Rutherford, keen-faced and clever, playing their parts in the mysterious game about which no mind save one could really know all. The China boy, smiling with his usual affectionate understanding (though sometimes, too, with that more cryptic smile which belongs to the unsearchable East) would mix them suave, delicious drinks. And they would smoke and talk of life in many climes and under all sorts of conditions. Captain Utterbourne, whatever the theme, could hold them in a thrall, when it pleased him. Sometimes he would elect silence. But when he began to speak, the air took on a subtle sparkle, though he was never guilty of mere wit.

And then, perhaps, the talk would turn to business—as it generally did, sooner or later, with so much still in the air which must be reduced to concreteness. And Elsa would grow bored and pick up a novel, which she would read, or pretend to read, with an air of languid absorption; or she would leave them and go out alone on deck in the lofty dark to dream of nobody knew what—dreams of her own, as profoundly hidden away in the unassailable depths of her consciousness as were the secret thoughts and broodings of the Captain himself.

Jerome had many talks with Elsa, too, for the days were long at sea, and each seemed glad of the other’s company. It was upon these occasions that Jerome most surprised himself, for they stirred in him a new and very pleasurable sense of poise, which he had never even dreamed of acquiring in the days of his futile groping. He felt himself a match for Elsa—not, however, that she didn’t frequently baffle him with her drooping eyes and coolly static expression.

He looked forward to their talks together; and in her own way, so did Elsa, too. Yes, perhaps in her own way Elsa looked forward to them with even more eagerness than Jerome himself. He interested her—particularly, she would tell herself, in the light of what his past had been. She remembered (and the picture kept rising in her mind) how she had come upon him that afternoon in the street with Stella, and how he had merely mumbled something and gone away. But she remembered, too, how his shoulders had straightened, as though unconsciously; and how she had felt, in her somewhat psychic manner, that it would be the beginning of better things for him. Then she had forgotten about him, and here he was again. She had not guessed that his progress would carry him so far in one short year.

Elsa discreetly (perhaps selfishly, too, without altogether realizing it) refrained from any mention of Stella at first, and Jerome never mentioned her, either. Yet, Stella was sometimes in their minds as they talked. And one evening she burst like a bomb on their ears. It was Utterbourne who spoke of her. The Star of Troy was bound for San Francisco, but there were to be stops: the Captain had already announced something a little vague about picking up cargo somewhere in the Chagos archipelago. Bluntly, at length, he turned to Elsa and said:

“By the way, we’re likely to run into one of your old friends.”

“Yes, dad?”

“She married Ferdinand King and they came out here to settle. Or have I told you all this before?”

“No, dad. It’s quite fresh news—except her marriage. If you remember, I was the maid of honour. Otherwise you’ve not repeated yourself,” replied his daughter dryly.

Jerome had a strong feeling of unreality. The news stabbed him with amazement. Yet after all it was only simple and natural that news of her at last should fall from the Captain’s lips. He found himself musing in many moods.

“What in the world do you suppose they can be doing ’way off here?” asked Elsa the next afternoon, as she and Jerome sat together under a bit of awning aft. “Did you hear the Captain say what island it is?”

“No. He said the Chagos group. I’m trying to recall what’s raised there.”

“Guava, I suppose,” said Elsa. “Or copra.”

“Mr. King must have been put in charge of some business. Perhaps he oversees output from the whole archipelago,” remarked Jerome with somewhat expansive generosity.

“Like a prince, in a way, didn’t you always think him?” ventured Elsa, her eyes darting toward him for a moment, but her expression otherwise supremely uncompromising.

“I’m afraid I’m hardly a judge of princes,” Jerome fenced back.

“Well, I mean—a sort of fabulous prince, you know,” she persisted. “Almost too good to be true.” Jerome laughed easily, and she went on: “His beauty, as I recollect it, was of that tremendous sort that leaves the whole world gasping as it passes by. I was conscious of it in church, during the ceremony.” And she added: “Were you there?” with another of her little exploring darts.

“At the church? Yes,” he answered carelessly. “I slipped in at the last minute, and stayed well back.”

Elsa gazed at him fixedly a moment, then observed: “Mr. King always reminded me a little of some Roman emperor, though which one I never figured out. Then he’s struck me as perhaps Apollo, with the soul of Sir Willoughby!” She laughed.

“You may be right,” her companion shrugged. “I barely met him once. I took him to be the type most women would fall for.”

“You haven’t a very high opinion of us, I’m afraid, as a sex, Mr. Stewart.”

“You mustn’t let my sweeping remarks lead you astray,” he said, his eyes coolly mirthful, and a new look of cynicism about his mouth.

“You mean you’re willing to allow there might be exceptions?” It wasn’t, perhaps, entirely clear, but that was Elsa’s way.

“Oh, yes, of course,” he laughed.

“That would give us common ground to meet on, wouldn’t it?”

“Then you glory in being an exception?” He seemed eager to play up to her mood—almost inspired to a sort of transient cleverness.

“Oh, naturally,” replied Elsa, her eyes drooping as she gazed off past him at nothing at all. “Just the way Tinker Bell gloried in being an ‘abandoned little creature.’ One lives and learns. Doesn’t one?”

“Yes.” After all, the plain monosyllable held still a place in his soul.

“I suppose you’re an exception, too,” she said, “if the subject isn’t becoming too vague with handling.”

“I believe we’re two of a kind,” he told her, with a real little flare of daring. There seemed a curious romantic gleam in the situation. “I’ve had my flings and learned my lessons,” he admitted.

She mused. “Yes. Still, it’s perhaps best to rap on wood, don’t you think?”

Jerome made a careless gesture. “Oh, I’m not worried.”

“Still,” she went on in her utterly unmoved way, “the world is a swarm of temptations, and the man who feels most secure is usually just the one to be twisted round some woman’s finger—or vice versa, of course. You understand.”

“Yes, I understand.”

In fact, they both understood. And in fact it seemed to them as they talked that there was rather a good deal of common ground. It was not an unpleasant discovery.

“I’d always said,” she went on, “I’d had my flings and learned my lessons too. But I’m not superstitious, and I never rapped on wood. Well,” she smiled, her brown eyes drooping a little more, “it would have been better if I had. For I was taken in, after all. I almost reached the point of parroting ‘I do’ in the presence of a rector. But I escaped in time, which is something,” she ended seriously, her wise young mouth taking on a singularly compact look.

He would have preferred, and really very much preferred, remaining unenmeshed in Elsa Utterbourne’s eyes. But it occurred to him that candour, in a case of this sort, might be the wisest course. Her own passionless frankness encouraged him, and he muttered: “I was taken in, too. But with me the case went a little harder.”

“How?”

“Well, I didn’t escape in time—that’s all.”

She gazed at him with renewed interest, her foot tapping slowly against the rail. “I didn’t know that,” she murmured. And, since he didn’t spontaneously enlarge upon the interesting announcement, as she hoped he would, the girl presently asked him: “Would you like to talk about it? If you wouldn’t, please say so. I’ll never mention it again.”

He laughed, shortly and with some bitterness. “It won’t be necessary to do much talking. It was just something that came about. The moon was partly responsible, but I don’t care to lay the blame on any one but myself.”

“Some one in the troupe?” Elsa ventured.

“Yes. We didn’t get on together. She’s on her way to San Francisco now—and freedom,” he replied, with quiet significance.

“I see,” she said.

Their eyes met, and they shared between them a complex smile.

II

There were times when you felt you could safely disregard what the Captain was saying, and go your way, for he was by no means a tyrant or martinet. On the other hand, there were now and then occasions when he said something one knew instinctively must be regarded. Perhaps more the inflection than the substance—or maybe just a faint lifting of the chilly, flickering eyebrows.

At any rate, when the Captain suggested to Elsa that she stay on board that evening with her novel and not attempt to explore the island until morning, she knew this to be one of the times. Shrugging her shoulders, she drawled:

“All right, Captain. It’ll be too dark by the time we get in to see the sights.” And added, a little languidly: “This doesn’t seem the liveliest of ports.”

“No. There’s an embargo on oil, and the natives have never heard of electricity. Mr. Rutherford, I’d cut down a little more. We can afford to creep here. There’s a legend about reefs, and you know,” he added, with a graceful gesture in the direction of the cabin where he kept his library of sailing directions, “even the best of our charts weren’t drawn by God Almighty.”

Though the restriction passed no further, and though he was secretly prodded with curiosity to see what sort of place this was to which Stella had come with her fabulous husband, Jerome announced to Elsa that he, too, would wait until morning to go ashore. He would stay and keep her company—unless she really preferred her book.

This pleased her, though she didn’t, of course, show it. It was interesting to come across a young man apparently quite as disillusioned as herself, and one who never attempted even abstractly, to make love to her. That, indeed, was the beauty of the whole arrangement, on both sides. Each felt as the other did about life, and especially about the opposite sex and romance and moonlight and all that sort of thing.

Jerome smiled easily as he suggested she might prefer her book, and Elsa—well. Elsa would very greatly have preferred him to her book; but she felt, too, just the way he did: that is, had penetrated beyond the tiresome realm of feeling altogether; so that; after all, at the last moment she made him go along. There was, to tell the truth, a tiny and very complex tremor of alarm in her enigmatic heart, and she knew she must remain indifferent at all costs. Besides, since a restriction had been laid down, she found it irksome to face the ordeal of waiting until morning for news of their mutual friend. There were times when the Captain was a little tedious.

Jerome, also, was very anxious to keep his new and hard-won indifference intact; but since whether he went or waited was a matter of very small consequence, he decided, on Elsa’s request, to go. Captain Utterbourne and two or three officers were about to embark in the little launch. Jerome ran and joined the shore party. The whole of the way in the Captain talked dreamily about the relative excellence of Cuban and Haitian rum.

III

It was quite dark when the launch crept up to the dock. There seemed to be no lights on the island. A queer sort of a place. And what was that spectral object that resembled a crazy derrick? Rutherford turned an electric flash upon it.

Suddenly a figure darted forward out of the dark and fell at the Captain’s feet. It was Tsuda. He uttered at first a high-pitched oriental lamentation. But a sharp word brought him to his feet, and he stood there before them with bowed head. Clearly it was not a joyous welcoming.

“What’s the matter?” asked the Captain, his voice low and commanding. The poet and dreamer were now wholly merged in the dynamic man of action.

“Evil come upon us!” Tsuda cried, his nervous brown hands writhing.

“Well, don’t let’s have any of your bizarre but redundant embroideries now, Tsuda. What do you mean by evil?”

“Death,” said Tsuda between his teeth.

It was all very weird, with the dark, and the mysterious background of tropical vegetation. But the sky was gradually growing lighter, and in a little while the moon would be up.

“Who is dead?” demanded Utterbourne sharply.

“It is the wife of the Kami....”

“Mrs. King—!” This was one of those rare occasions when the man of many shrouds found himself betrayed into a really spontaneous exclamation. He added quickly: “When did it happen?”

“About a week ago, Captain.”

“But how?”

“Just fell sick of watching,” replied Tsuda simply, and with the faintest suggestion of reproach in his voice, as though he would like delicately to fix a slice of the responsibility on the shoulders of his inquisitor.

And Utterbourne, though he ignored the reproach, seemed to comprehend. “My God,” he said very softly, under his breath. But already his mind was grappling with possibilities, some of which might be realities, beyond this fact. “Where’s King?” he asked with the former terseness.

Tsuda hesitated, as though delicately loath to be the bearer of so much ill news. “The White Kami,” he muttered at length, “lies—gn—in a trance, Captain. We can’t rouse him much any more. Yet sometimes he cry out about the ogres. They are still go on, you know, yes sir, even if Raiko—”

“That’s enough!” exclaimed Utterbourne almost savagely, though still in a very low voice. “I tell you it’s no time for your prattle about the gods. Where is King?”

“In the great house, Captain.”

“What do you mean by saying he’s in a trance? Do you mean—opium?”

“Sss,” replied Tsuda, and was still.

Captain Utterbourne thrust out his hands and gripped Tsuda’s arms—felt the man tremble in his clutch.

“If all this isn’t the truth, let’s have it now. Otherwise it will go hard with you later.”

Utterbourne was a man who, when a situation seemed perfectly simple, could make it appear obscure and devious, but who, if a situation was full of doubt and mystery, could speak out bluntly from the shoulder.

“No, no—the truth!” cried Tsuda. “By all the shrines of Shinshu...!” And in a moment he added: “The White Kami is fall on evil ways, Captain.”

“And Mrs. King?”

“We bury her—gn—near the temple, on holy ground with the rest that have die.”

A stillness followed, then Utterbourne asked:

“What are those lights moving along there through the trees?”

Tsuda replied: “Every night send up offering to the temple for the soul of Wife-of-the-Kami. She fall sick of watching, but now the gods are good to her,” he murmured cryptically.

There was a dead silence. The breathing of all the group was faintly audible.

Jerome, at the first words concerning Stella, had turned very pale. What this talk of a kami was he couldn’t fathom. But he had known with the vividness of lightning that the wife of the Kami meant Stella, and that Stella was dead. He felt dazed. For anything but this he had been prepared. Now he seemed completely cut adrift, and could scarcely think. It seemed a new vortex in his life. Half an hour ago this would have seemed impossible, but now he felt himself carried away by a rush of emotion he could not understand. Married and happy, Stella could never have meant more to him than a troubled dream; dead of unhappiness, she took possession of his heart and wrung it.

IV

“We’ll go on to your house, Tsuda,” said Captain Utterbourne more gently, “and get to the bottom of this business.”

Tsuda nodded and led the way. The Captain turned back with a muttered remark to one of his men: “I had an uneasy feeling there was something wrong here. Places send out strong waves of vibration.”

It was, in truth, these same “waves” which had whispered him to take the one slight precaution of keeping Elsa on board till the situation had been traversed. As a matter of fact, one of the sly, unspoken objects back of his acquiescence in Elsa’s request to come along with him on this voyage had been the thought that her presence here would have a stimulating and reassuring, a sort of bolstering effect on Mrs. King. If she had grown lonely and discontented, Elsa would cheer her and (with perhaps a little judicious manipulation) convince her that it would be much easier now to face out another year on the island. If King was doing well it would be a pity to let him slip on to other fields just yet.

But the Captain had felt strangely uneasy, from the moment the anchor dropped; and he preferred that Elsa be held temporarily in reserve. As a recruit, Jerome, also, was a little new. But Utterbourne was anxious not to strike any wrong notes of unnecessary secrecy with him just now, and besides wanted him to get more or less the “feeling” of these adventures, which would help his background. Backgrounds were very important things. He little guessed the commotion in Jerome’s mind at the present moment.

A step or two farther along, Captain Utterbourne remembered he had neglected to bring out a small chest of bright trash which Tsuda would pounce on eagerly—gay, valueless objects that would fit into his scheme of Ainu culture. Possibly the chest might tend to put Tsuda in a frame of mind for withholding nothing. Men like Tsuda had to be treated tenderly. The trouble with Tsuda was that he was too suspicious. Tsuda would be suspicious of a fly if it happened to look a little different from most other flies.

“Would you mind, Sargeant, going back for it now—h’m?”

So the party temporarily disbanded. Utterbourne and Sutherland went on with Tsuda, while Sargeant and Rutherford turned back toward the launch.

At this moment of disruption a wild and romantic design entered Jerome’s head and captured it entirely. In the dark he made his escape from both parties. Utterbourne supposed he had gone back with Sargeant, while the returning men thought he had gone on with Utterbourne—or rather no one gave him any deliberate thought at all. But Jerome, dodging behind a huge palm, waited until the steps in both directions had died out.

Alone on an unknown island he stood, his heart given over to a sudden wave of impulse. Stella was dead. In life their ways had been roughly sundered; in death she seemed, during this feverish, pulsing hour, given back to him again. He seemed to have achieved an intangible victory over the man who had once cast him into a humiliating discard—yes, all in the first, swift, terrible knowledge of her fate.

He would go alone to her grave—he would be the first to look upon it. Perhaps the others would not even go, since after all what is a grave? But he would go; it was his hour of triumph. Life had divided their ways, but death had brought them together again. Poor Stella. Things had turned out very differently with her from what she had hoped. Probably no one would ever know just what had taken place. She became starry with mystery and bound up in an eternal beauty of suspense. Yes, he would go to her grave; for despite what he had become, Stella must always be in his mind the woman he once loved. Indifference, while it may carry a man far, can never quite blot out a memory like that.

During the preceding sombre conversation he had caught at words as they fell, almost without heeding them at the time. Now they hung together in his mind and formed a vivid picture. The grave was near the temple ... you could tell it by the fresh flowers. And the string of lights ... they were taking up an offering ... an offering to heathen gods for the soul of Stella. It was ghastly. It all but passed belief.

Keeping his distance, and walking as softly as possible, Jerome made off after the procession of twinkling lights. Overhead the heavy tropical stars were shining brightly. There would be a moon presently; the east was aglow; but in the jungle it was very dark. The way was long, and the strange men with the lights went ever on ahead.

After a time a tropical grove was reached, in whose midst stood the temple. No one, at first, approached very close: there seemed a recognized margin of some sort, beyond which the ground was holy. Of them all, the single figure alone, bearing in his hands a woven tray heaped with the choicest fruits of the place, went on toward the temple itself; the rest squatted upon the ground. Not a word was spoken. It was a strange and awful ceremony.

The moon was just rising, full and yellow; the first soft beams began to steal in through the breeze-stirred palm orchard to illumine the temple with a pale light. But the resinous torches cast up everything in bold, dancing relief. Jerome, on the outskirts, crouching, felt his mind in greater tumult even than before. He seemed to himself almost possessed.

It was a Japanese temple. They had ruined Tsuda’s chances of becoming a priest; but he knew a temple from torii to sessha. It was surrounded by a low wall with a gate. Outside the gate was a tiny spring of fresh water. Jerome could see it: a little pool just troubled in the torchlight.

All about sprang the rich blackness of a tropical growth, the most lush he had ever beheld. The moon was climbing slowly up the sky. He was glad he had come. Life was wonderful and sad. He watched with eyes that tried to record every detail of this unearthly hour.

The figure with the offering uttered a bit of weird chanting; then suddenly the words ceased, and the tray was deposited on a small altar at the foot of a flight of steps leading up to the temple itself. That was all. The crude fragment of ritual concluded, these strange beings with bushy hair and prodigious drooping moustaches moved away in silence. Jerome, crouching in his hiding place, watched them pass by, one by one, and disappear. He could see the twinkling lights, like far-off tapers, winding farther and farther. Then silence was supreme.

He remained still in hiding what seemed to him a long, long time. Never had he been in a place so intensely still. When at length he stirred and began moving cautiously toward the temple, his senses were abnormally alert with the painful excitement. But he was ever conscious, too, of that odd feeling of triumph in his heart. Death had seemed to put her back somehow into his hands again. He couldn’t get away from that thought—nor did he want to get away from it. Jerome even began projecting, vaguely and fitfully, a scene with Stella’s father: he would go in very simply and tell him how he had visited her grave alone tonight.

The past was irrevocably behind them; but his heart would not be still.

Suddenly he stopped, thrilling with terror, as a great bird rose up from almost beneath his feet and flew off screaming across the silvered dark. It looked like a great sinister eagle, yet it had the neck of a crane and head plumage of what (though moonlight can create delusion as regards colours) seemed brilliant vermilion. He could hear the bird still screaming at a great distance, crashing on through the tangle of its native wood as though quite blind. After that the silence was still more poignant.

Pulling himself together, Jerome moved on slowly, seeking the grave with the flowers. There were a number of mounds all about, but they looked ancient. Far around to one side, however, he found at last the grave he sought—in the dark stumbled against it, and was really on his knees before he realized this was, in truth, the end of his quest.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
PITCHERS AND STARS

I

Moonlight filled the open space and flooded the temple with a bath of bluish white.

Jerome knelt beside the grave in the shadow of great palms. In the midst of this world of silence he suddenly felt a little self-conscious. Impulse, he feared, had carried him to lengths which it would be rather difficult to explain. Yet she was the woman he had loved, and men can never forget these things.

“I must go back, now,” he thought.

Slowly he raised his eyes, and was glad of the stars and the moon. It required the stars and the moon and the pounding of one’s own heart at a time like this to keep a man sane. He clung, rather, to the familiar, static facts in his life—a life now so changed, which had once been packed with all that was familiar and unchanging.

Stella lay dead at his feet, and on the little altar out there in the moonlight was the offering placed at the threshold of the gods for Stella’s soul. He bowed his head a moment, shaken with amazement and confused regret. When he raised his head, however, and was about to take his departure, Jerome started. He fancied he had seen something stir in the moonlight. In another moment he was sure of it.

The paper door of the temple was slowly moving. His finger nails gripped hard against his palms, and he braced himself by another swift glance at the unheeding dome of night.

Yes, the door of the temple was opening—slowly, very slowly; first only a hair’s breadth, then wider and wider, till the aperture was sufficient to permit a slender, white-clad form to slip through and out into the soft radiance of the night.

It was a brilliant object-lesson in the science of attention. Quakes might have riven the earth, and he would have gazed on, through the space of that first electric moment. Jerome trembled violently, felt the cold sweat of terror and unbelief on his forehead. His eyes beheld her—yet how could it be she? His mind seemed suddenly crazed. He had been through too much in one little hour, he reasoned, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again she would be gone: there would be only the moonlight on the silent temple, and he would go back to the Star of Troy and take up his life once more.

But the white figure was still before him. And then, like a dart of dazzling inspiration, he knew this was really she, and no creature of disordered fancy. Yet all the while he knelt on her grave and could not move or speak.

She looked quickly about and listened. Jerome caught something intimate and familiar in the tilt of her head. In their old eventless lives she had tilted her head just that way, sometimes. He was rigid while the girl very cautiously crept out on to the steps of the temple and descended to the shrine where the offering had been placed.

Her movements were nervous and stealthy. At the foot of the flight she paused to look about and listen. Then, in an abrupt, snatching way, she seized some of the food and ran back up the steps with it, disappearing into the temple. After a moment she reappeared, and this time moved as though actuated by a slightly less acute nervousness—even lingered a moment to gaze up, in a tense lost way, at the beauty of the night sky. Then she was gone.

It was a time of breathlessness for Jerome, indeed. A time of uncanny, prickling faintness. He trembled. The emotion seemed almost unbearable. Yet he knew she was Stella; and the former romantic appreciation of melancholy triumph was giving way to the chaos foreshadowing readjustment. It was a time of incredulous certainty. A time when fresh sensation seemed to overwhelm all the previous sensations of a lifetime. It was no time for speculation, however; how she came there while he knelt on her grave—what it all meant—must wait. The only concrete issue that really mattered was whether she would emerge again. If not, what should he do? But if she did come out? He could call to her—run and touch her—last frantic doubts—to see if she were real. Still, the fright of it for her.... Well, what then?

A suspicion hackneyed and shiny from human usage clutched at his reason almost comfortingly: “I guess I’ll wake up in a minute!”

She came, carrying a small stone pitcher—came down quickly and crossed the enclosure to the spring beside the tiny gate, where she stopped. Jerome’s mind, laying about feverishly for some piece of subterfuge whereby his presence might be made known without causing her any alarm, yielded nothing but confusion. There must be some way—he ought to be enough of an adventurer and man of the world by this time.... Yet after all he could only stay where he was and call her name—a little more gently and indeed reverently than quite consorted with his new creed of woman-hating.

“Stella!”

Hardly more than a murmur, though it seemed to boom and echo, as a voice will under stress of an unusual silence.

She cried out and fled back to the little flight of steps; but he came forward, an arm outstretched.

“Don’t be afraid, Stella. I’m Jerome.”

And he stopped, stood still where he had emerged from shadow into the moonlight.

She could see him distinctly. She was grasping the pitcher of water with both hands—not that it was the last pitcher in existence, nor that she was so very much concerned about the water, for there was ever so much more of it; she clung to the pitcher, rather, the way Jerome had been clinging to the heavenly bodies. There had to be something perfectly regular, like pitchers or stars, to keep hold of.

But when she saw it really was Jerome, she sat down very limply on the top step and did a tremendously natural thing: she began crying—tears that had burned long, unreleased, when she had thought there were no more tears left.

II

Inside, the temple was just a single tiny room with an altar against the far wall. The altar was a crude affair, with a “holy of holies” containing an undersized image of the goddess Amaterasu. Two small windows high up let in the moonlight. Still, it was so dark after the comparative brightness without that at first it was possible to distinguish very little. Stella drew the paper door back across the opening through which they had entered. After that, to the outer world the temple presented its usual blank and uninhabited look.

“We must be quiet,” she said, her voice much shaken with terror and tears. “Shall we sit down on the floor?”

The gleam of hysterical wildness in her eyes cautioned him she must be humoured; and he realized, too, that as yet she knew none of the particulars behind his presence. What an amazing situation it was—what an amazing proposition life was, anyhow, that it should evolve such moments as this under an unperturbed sky, and with everything else about the universe intact....

They sat there facing each other on the floor, in the centre of the temple to the goddess Amaterasu, and at first the immense strangeness of it all put a restriction upon speech: there was so much to be asked and so much to be answered that a sense of painful self-consciousness played conspirator with the so slowly subsiding shock of this coming together—out of a void, as it were.

When at last she spoke, it was in a tense whisper: “Did you come in the Star of Troy?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, thank God!” He heard her wildly sobbing again.

“Have you been expecting Captain Utterbourne a long time?”

“August,” she faltered, “—then in February. It’s over a year—two long months over a year.... Since coming to live in the temple, I’ve lost all count of the days. Is this Friday?”

“No, Thursday, Stella.”

“Thursday,” she murmured after him, her voice strained and colourless. Then she clasped her hands suddenly and asked in tones verging upon shrillness: “How did you find your way, Jerome?”

“They told us you were dead.”

“Dead?” It was a repetition choked with bewilderment.

“When we came ashore the Japanese met us—”

“Tsuda!” Her breath caught sharply.

“Yes, Tsuda.”

And in the same swift instant Jerome shared her vivid grasp of the situation. They sat in silence, both stunned by the terror of it.

“What did Tsuda say?” she asked him presently, her voice so low he could just make out the words.

“He said ‘evil’ had come. And when Captain Utterbourne asked him what he meant by that, he said: ‘Death.’ And then he said: ‘The wife of the Kami.’ Why do they call him that?”

“My husband...?” she murmured, her tone groping and lifeless. “They call him the White Kami here. It’s too terrible to speak of!”

A vague little gesture, and her hand fell limp.

Yes, all too terrible. Religion and sakÉ. And the daughter of a harness merchant who had married in a mood of such unreasoning exuberance, with relief from the humdrum of her life so eagerly grasped, was reduced at length to dwelling in a Shinto temple, while the Master Mind dallied with a fine intellectual passion over such theses as the failure of civilization, and laid plans for bringing down perhaps a rhinoceros or two in the realm of the raja....

“But why are you here in this temple?” Jerome asked.

“It’s such a long, long story,” she quiveringly sighed, while again the hysterical sobs shook her violently.

He felt her misery across the dark.

After a time she grew a little coherent. “I had to come here, Jerome—I had to. My husband....” The words faltered, though he heard her still thickly murmuring, like one in a fever.

Then he remembered. “I know,” he said softly. “They spoke of that, too, Stella....”

Yes, they had spoken of that. But they did not know (except Tsuda) how in one of his frenzies King had attacked her with a knife; and not even Tsuda knew that the knife had actually entered her body. But Tsuda had seized upon King’s madness as an admirable and timely pretext for insisting upon the hospitality of the gods.

Through one of the little high windows Jerome could see the moon, mounting in sublime unconcern. There is something always so utterly calm and unhurried about the moonlight.

Stella’s face was brimming with anguish, and she seemed ever in motion: her fingers kept lacing and fumbling—sometimes she would fold her hands and bow her head over them in an attitude of helpless submission. But only for a moment. Her head would be raised with a start, and she would run a hand through her hair, or make an aimless gesture, if she chanced to be speaking. Her voice, too, had an unresting quality. It sounded a note of suffering, and of an immense sadness deeper still, which had certainly never been there in the old days when she had rebelled against her destiny. It was a new note, vibrating, as it were, across the tissue of her very being.

She inclined her head. “No one will ever know, Jerome, what I’ve gone through.”

He grasped at it with unconscious avidity. Had he realized, in a perfectly bald way, how he felt, he would no doubt have been a little horrified. But in the very depths of his heart—that is to say, in the very depths of his ego—Jerome found curious, sweet comfort in the knowledge that her marriage with this other man, this prince (as Elsa called him, with drooping eyes) had at length proved a thing of reproach and bitterness.

“And Tsuda....”

“Yes,” she said, her eyes quite wide with this new terror in her heart. “It was Tsuda who brought me here. He told me I’d be safe. There were times before.... But he said this would be a sanctuary, and that I’d be quite safe with the gods. You have to know Tsuda to understand all this.”

“But you could not have known Tsuda, really,” observed Jerome with narrowness of tone, his voice grown steady and cool now, and a shade aloof.

“He seemed to be my only friend,” she said miserably. “Oh, Jerome—if you knew everything.... As for the motive—it’s too hideously plain, isn’t it? Tsuda arranged to have offerings brought up in the evening. It was a part of his religious observances. His brother was a priest, and Tsuda would have been a priest too....” There was a wildly monotonous quality in her speech. She was wringing her hands.

They were silent a moment, and then, seeming to grasp the completeness of the irony, he muttered: “Those very offerings that kept life in your body were part of a ritual over your death...!”

She shuddered. “It was the grave of one of the Ainu! I asked Tsuda why they were heaping flowers on it, and he said it was a part of their religion—because the man had been brought to his death by a spell....”

“If I hadn’t come here tonight,” said Jerome, solemn and scarcely breathing, “the Star of Troy might have sailed off again without your knowing!”

She gave a little sharp terrified cry, and he saw that the matter must not be enlarged upon. Nevertheless, in his own mind conjecture played with all the lurid possibilities. Even had Utterbourne taken it into his head to come and look upon the grave, Tsuda would have taken good care the girl in the temple knew nothing of it. He saw Tsuda creeping up here very early in the morning and putting her to sleep with something. Tsuda.... The Star of Troy would have steamed off. And after that....

But he merely asked, with an inflection of grimness, out of the silence:

“Are you the only white woman here?”

“Yes, Jerome, the only one.”

Then she was very still. She was not weeping now.

III

They would never know what she had endured. Yet her hopes had once run so high.... Well, the pendulum swings; and after all there are no favourites, except perhaps in a whimsical or poetic sense.

Stella and Jerome, at the feet of the everlasting gods; and irony sniffed and chuckled in the corners. Both were vividly conscious of the play of forces in their lives, and of that immense quality of change which, developed through the scenes of the drama that had so capriciously caught them up, revealed itself now in all they did and said.

Calmer, she asked him about his phase of the drama: how had he come on the Star of Troy when she had left him irrevocably in the rut of Oaks, Ferguson & Whitley’s? And he told her a little of his vast adventure, while her heart was stricken with a curious confusion—partly, no doubt, because of the aloof manner which, more and more, he was coming to display toward her.

These were baffling days—and a queer, wrong-way-round business life can be, she thought, when it has a mind. Jerome’s reactions were rather simpler: Stella, alive and married to another man, drifted back into the mere troubled dream which the thought of her death had momentarily broken.

“You’re making something really worth while out of your life, aren’t you?” she said softly, yet in a voice still strained from emotion; and her gaze, across the dimness of the temple, seemed compounded of incredulity, wistfulness, and a wild despair. Occasionally a tiny sob still caught her breath.

Jerome smiled in his new worldly and rather cynical way. “You mustn’t forget,” he generously reminded her, “that to begin with I was carried off like a limp bag of meal!” And then he gave her more details—without bothering, however, to stick quite so close to all the facts as to make himself entirely a comic figure, even in the beginning.

“Isn’t it strange, Jerome, how some of the last things we’d ever think possible are the very things that do happen to us?” Her hands, never still, stroked her cheeks aimlessly.

“I’ve thought of that sometimes,” he answered. “I guess it would never have struck any one as likely, a year or two ago, that you’d end by marrying a man like Mr. King and be carried off to an island to raise opium! And I guess,” he went on impartially, with again the touch of grimness, “it never struck us, either, that I was the kind of fellow who would join an opera troupe and end by letting one of the singers—take my name....” He never could seem quite to bring it out baldly. He had evaded a little, also, with Elsa, and had not used the actual word, though in the end, of course, it amounted to the same thing.

“Married, Jerome? A singer...?”

Her eyes were all amazement and inquiry across the dusk of the temple. But he tossed his head with a careless fling, for he was fully revived now, and even if it was difficult, circumstances being what they were, to make the announcement with real and satisfying bravado, still he wanted her to know that he, too, had had his taste of matrimony—though he didn’t mention it had only been after a fashion....

She could hardly believe the things she saw and heard; and she remembered how she had sent the ring back by Ted without a message.

The moon climbed higher, and a tiny night wind was springing. It made the tattered leaves of the palms and giant ferns shiver softly, like rain. Stella felt his aloofness, and a shy reticence came upon her tongue. She sat silent.

“I guess we’ve both changed some,” Jerome laughed coolly, assuming more lightness than he perhaps really felt. He was a little ashamed of his very romantic state of mind an hour ago.

“People couldn’t go through all we have in the past year without changing.” Her voice reached the heart with its pathetic deadness. The woman drooped and gently shook before him.

Another silence, with the sad swish of the jungle outside, under a white moon.

“Hagen’s Island,” she murmured brokenly after awhile, “is a place where you come to know yourself through and through.” And he saw still more vividly that this was not the girl he had known in his groping days of hobbledehoy. “I’ve tried to believe it would come right in the end,” she resumed in a moment, “—maybe after a long, long time. But all the while—” it faltered just a little—“all the while I’ve had a feeling I’d never see home again.” Then she looked up and spoke with a touch of hysterical brightness: “I used to sit on the rocks, Jerome, and imagine what a home-coming it would be! You don’t mind my rambling on like this, do you Jerome?”

“Of course not.” But he was privately marvelling. Stella—great Scott!—actually sighing over the thought of home, where nothing ever happened! It made him smile—oh, ever so worldly and sophisticated a smile; and he couldn’t help remembering again how she used to sail into him in her impetuous, young, rebellious way, for being so satisfied with his humdrum lot.

“Jerome,” she said presently, in a voice it was obviously a little difficult still to control, “you haven’t told me anything about your wife.”

He made an indefinite sound with his lips, and a look half of amusement, half of grimness, yet also somewhat of a gentler sadness, came into his eyes. “No, I haven’t,” he admitted.

“Are you happy, Jerome?”

“Now? Oh, yes.”

“Where is she?”

“Where? Oh, off on the high seas somewhere. The fact is,” he continued more bluffly, “we’ve separated, Stella. It wasn’t a success. We bored each other. As Captain Utterbourne would say, these experiments require a sort of real genius if they’re not to turn out failures. I believe,” he added with a sparkle, “the Captain speaks from experience.”

Stella looked at him, then her eyes faltered. There was an immense confusion in her heart. All at once she, too, remembered how she had scolded him so bitterly that afternoon in the fog. “If I were a man,” she had cried with high, impatient scorn, “I think I’d discover something besides being a clerk in a dingy old ship supply store!” And now he had discovered something besides that. He had discovered another destiny altogether, and she could play no part in it.

She contemplated, as they sat together on the moonlit temple floor, the tangle into which their lives had drifted.

---

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“PUT NOT YOUR TRUST IN PRINCES”

I

Utterbourne sat with impassive face in the house of Tsuda. Finally he said: “We will go to see King.”

Nipek-kem went proudly on ahead with a lantern. He did not know exactly what it was all about—he was just faithfully fulfilling the demands of his destiny.

“I want you to see for yourself, Captain—gn—what I’ve been up against here,” wheezed Tsuda, adding in high-pitched oriental petulance: “For months every damn scrap of business fall on me. He smoke ten—twenty—mebby fifty pipe a day—yes, sir—and then sleep it off—and eat it, too, just like a Malay. You see for yourself when you go in where he is—gn—what a damn job I have of it!”

Utterbourne hummed and made no reply.

When they neared the house, Tsuda volunteered, a sad look in his bright, equivocal eyes: “Last time I pay a friendly visit, Captain, the White Kami throw a chair at me.” Tsuda sighed and shook his long head. “The will of the gods—gn—something we can’t understand....”

“The will of the gods,” mused Utterbourne, a little mystically.

“After that,” Tsuda added, “I keep my distance, you damn bet! A man don’t care to risk his life—no, sir!” And he cringed a little, the posture seeming subtly to add to the impressiveness of his own earlier words—“what I’ve been up against here.”

“Tsuda,” said Utterbourne dreamily, “what’s the name of this favourite son of his people who’s honouring us with the lantern?”

“That is Nipek-kem, Captain.”

“Nipek-kem,” ordered Utterbourne, turning toward the Ainu, “come here with the light a minute.”

The young savage stared. Tsuda uttered a few curt foreign syllables, and then the Ainu bounded toward them.

“Nipek-kem,” suggested the Captain in his lazy drawl, “please hold the lantern just here.”

Tsuda, vaguely alarmed, repeated the command in the crude dialect of Paromushir. All his antennae were out. He sniffed the psychic air between them.

The Ainu youth, his shirt royal with souvenirs of service, like that of a general after a life of triumphant campaigns, held the light where he was bidden to hold it.

Captain Utterbourne glanced round the circle, then murmured: “I’ve been wondering, Tsuda, about that curious little pouch at your belt. You never used to wear it.”

The two men stared at each other, striving to break through those barriers which the Great Mother teaches her children to throw up about their souls.

“That, Captain? Oh—gn—it’s—”

“Quite so, Tsuda. Nevertheless, I think you’d better give us the gun.”

The duel of eyes continued, each holding the other. It became more primitive from moment to moment.

“The gun, Captain?”

Not all his cleverness was quite equal to the task of maintaining, in presence of this awful poker stare, a convincing mask of innocence. His life might depend on his holding the Captain’s eyes; but it was an ordeal beyond his powers. He faltered. Suddenly, however, a great light broke across the lined old face with its strangely youthful eyes, and he explained: “It was a present—from Wife-of-the-Kami. I guess what you call it—gn—a keepsake!” And he brought out then, in triumph, the island’s only revolver, handling the little weapon as a child would a cherished toy.

The Captain didn’t fail to appreciate it all: the light of triumph, the fondness; still he insisted, quietly but with an undertone of iron firmness: “You’d better give it to Mr. Sutherland. Keepsakes are sometimes dangerous, Tsuda. I must have neglected to warn you.”

Tsuda shivered a little with terror and foreboding. However, Captain Utterbourne made no further comment in this connection.

“I’m going in alone,” the Captain said. “It might excite Mr. King if we all descended upon him together. He might think us some of Tsuda’s ogres—the Ogres of Oyeyama.... Sometimes frenzy carries them very far—h’m? There’s a story told of an opium fiend in Java—or perhaps it was hashish, I don’t remember. He ran amuck at Batavia and killed a lot of people in the street before reserves arrived and he was finally run through by a soldier. The strength of fiends in certain stages—h’m?—it’s said to be sometimes enormous. The fellow was run through with a pike, yet such still was the desperation of the man that he—h’m?—he worked himself forward on the pike, and when he got near enough, stabbed the soldier to death with a dagger. Therefore—h’m?” the Captain ended, “I will enter alone. But I will take the lantern from Nipek-kem. Tsuda, will you assure this impressive individual that he may safely trust the lantern in my hand?”

II

At first it was hard to make out much of anything in Mrs. King’s “parlour.” A murk of opium smoke made the gloom tangible. The lamp was not lighted. It had a crazy newspaper shade now, and the chimney was streaked black. The table on which it stood was cluttered with rubbish and clumsily opened tins which had held meats and fish. The whole place was foul, and the air was so thick it could only be breathed with the greatest difficulty by lungs not inoculated.

From a corner of the room came the sound of measured breathing. King was expelling opium smoke from mouth and nose. He seemed to be drawing up the smoke from the very soles of his feet, and his eyes were closed in ecstasy—partly immediate, but more depending upon a knowledge of the sweet torment in store for him. There was another steady intake from the pipe, another exhalation; and, the resources of the pipe exhausted, it was laid aside. For a few moments the inert man made feeble wafting motions in the air with one hand.

And above him, on the wall, Captain Utterbourne perceived a bright print of a sailor returned to his own fireside. Below it was the last leaf of a calendar, with all the dates blocked black. And beside it was a sheet of paper on which several new months had been indicated with a pencil. He seemed to realize what it meant with something faintly like a flicker of emotion.

Utterbourne went to the man on the cot, leaned down over him, and said, in a clear, loud voice:

“Mr. King!”

The crouching figure shuddered, and with a wretched, baffled effort, tried to shake off the mounting lethargy. He opened his eyes, wanly questioning, and at length managed to stagger up from the cot.

King was meagrely clothed, and dirty—a sad object, all in all, and a pretty far cry, now, from any reasonable conception of a god.

Suddenly, as he faced the newcomer with the lantern, a light of frenzied recognition flamed in his face, making the havoc there singularly vivid. He took a lurching step and stretched out his arms, his eyes moving with obscured intelligence.

“Utterbourne!” he cried out in a terrible voice and flung his arms heavily about the other’s neck, as a drunkard might. “Good God, Utterbourne! What a hell to leave a man in....” But it flickered weakly.

His cheeks were grey, and so far shrunk from their former appearance as to resemble a tough, thin substance stretched tightly over the bones of the face. He was afflicted with general marasmus or consumption of the flesh, and to look into the man’s face now was almost like looking at a skull plastered with smoked wax.

He bore down on Utterbourne’s shoulders, and a ray of drifting content came into his eyes—eyes which began to look even a little blue and round again, though the dull fire of delirium made their expression still one of wreck and hopelessness. The Captain manoeuvred him back on to the cot, pushing him with an arm that partly repelled and partly supported. King dropped, an almost grateful little cry on his lips, and for a while sat looking helplessly up at the face bent down toward him, so unchanging.

“I’d like to know more about everything here,” said Utterbourne, in a firm yet inviting voice.

“Yes?” answered King, his hands dangling forlornly. “Yes?” And he gazed with vacant eyes in which the last spark of fascination had long ago smouldered and gone out. He had an odd way of swaying and dodging, occasionally even raising an arm, as though to ward off some menace. When he spoke it was in a clear but singularly detached voice, and he seemed frequently to grope about for even the most commonplace words.

“Will you sit down and—talk to me?” he implored. “You don’t know—what did I start to say? You don’t know—what it’s like to hear a white man speak again!”

“I will,” agreed the Captain quietly. “Let me light the lamp. Where do you keep your matches?”

“I don’t seem to understand—very well. Would you mind being a little more—a little more....” He swayed and his eyes closed.

“Never mind. I have matches.” And in a moment the lamp was lighted, though it did not materially relieve the gloom of the place. Then Utterbourne sat down and spoke King’s name again in loud, commanding tone.

“Mr. King!”

It smote against the silence ominously. Utterbourne, with his life of multiple sensation, had perhaps never before found himself immersed in an atmosphere so profoundly sombre.

“Yes—yes,” muttered the swaying cadaver.

The Captain shook him, and the man on the cot made another genuine effort to control his waning senses.

“I am—Ferdinand King,” he said, almost in a chanting way. “I came out here to take charge of a—of a....” He seemed to drift again and lose the thread.

“I know,” encouraged the other man.

“Opium! That was it! Sometimes it all seems—to fade away. We were keeping it dark....” A sound like a rattling chuckle drifted off his lips. Then his eyes gradually filled with such a look of penetrating anguish that the Captain shaded his own eyes and gazed at the tiny spirit flame beneath its dome of glass. “Even my wife ...” murmured King. It was a look, surely, that came from the very bottom of the beaten man’s soul; and it takes a superhuman courage indeed to behold such a look with no flinching.

Tears rushed from King’s eyes, and he went on murmuring: “I had a wife once—a lovely girl—so pretty and gentle—but perhaps you’ve seen her....” His voice was low, and he went on more brokenly, rocking himself slowly back and forth: “They say she has died. She seems—to be gone away....” He struggled, his eyes moving vaguely. “Gone away.... Oh, God help me!” he suddenly cried out with a hollow yet considerable force. Then he grew dense and inaudible again, though continuing to mutter, apparently under the persuasion that he was still speaking intelligently.

Utterbourne, his glance roving about the dim sombre place, caught sight of an uncased hunting knife on the table beneath the lamp with its crazy shade. The knife had a menacing, a naked look.

The man on the cot was babbling weakly, and to bring him back once more to a state of coherency, Utterbourne spoke with the former incision: “Look here, King!”

“I’m glad you’ve—come,” the other managed thickly, his eyes gazing sadly out through tears that had pooled and ceased flowing. “I was looking for you—there’s a big book over there—over there....” His arm waved with childish vagueness. “I started in to write up—a report. There would have been time....” He made a ghastly attempt to smile. Then, “I’m afraid,” he drifted, “you’ll find it—not quite up to date....”

Utterbourne perceived the book, down on the floor under a mantle of dust. He crossed, curious, and took it up. The first hundred pages or so were filled with a flowing and elegant penmanship, but toward the end the writing had grown shaky and rough. The last entry was dated November 17.

“In a little while,” muttered King nebulously, “I’m going—on with it....” When Utterbourne returned he found him examining his nails with close attention. Now and then he rubbed his palms together gently. The tears that lay splashed on his cheeks already were emblems of an emotion so ancient that the wretched man had forgotten it, almost as though through eons of Brahmic life.

“Yes—yes.... What was I saying? About the crop? We’ve been—very successful—but I hope another year....” He dozed and came to. “I say I hope we’ll be able to put up—a tank for the rains so we can irrigate. Then you see ... I don’t know.... Does that answer your question?”

“King,” said the Captain sadly and a little dryly, “how did you come to fall for your own goods?”

The other looked up wanly and again tried to smile. It was long before he comprehended what had been said, but at length he began murmuring: “I really can’t say—no, I can’t. It seems—such a long time....” And after another somnolent pause he asked: “What did I say?”

“We won’t go into it tonight,” sighed Captain Utterbourne, rising heavily. “Go to sleep, King. In the morning we’ll try to get at more of the facts.”

Then a look of groping alarm came into the face of the White Kami, and he began beating his hands together. “I wish you wouldn’t go away!” he pleaded. “Only a little while after you’re gone, they’ll begin to come in for the night!” His eyes smouldered wildly. “Don’t go away just yet. I—I’ll see if I can answer your question—if you’ll wait.” He beat his fists against his head, but rather coaxingly than savagely. The veins stood out as he made a terrific effort at concentration. “Yes!” His face lighted faintly. “It was about the opium. Not the crop—no....” He shook his head, as though patiently arguing with himself. “Me—me! Wasn’t that what you wanted? At first—at first I used very little. Yes—don’t go away! I’m—going to tell you how it was. It was—Tsuda.... I guess he uses a little now and then, too. Perhaps some day you’ll want to try—a jaunt. In that case.... What was I saying? Did I say Tsuda? Yes—that’s right. That’s right.... I kept telling myself,” he rambled, his manner growing more and more agitated, and wilder, with an inflection of impatience, “I’d quit—I’d quit....” Then, his tone growing warm and dreamy, and fresh tears springing to his eyes: “We were going to settle down—in some little ... in some little place where nothing much ever happens—but it seems sometimes—no, don’t go! I try to hold on, and my fingers ... my fingers keep slipping off....” He regarded his fingers ruefully, flexing them at the joints in a childish way. His expression grew very dull and hopeless. “The lamp,” he muttered. “Would you mind—looking? I’m afraid the oil’s very low.”

“Never mind, King,” said Utterbourne huskily. “In the morning....”

But he paused in his departure, and saw with amazement a look of swift and convulsing terror leap into the other’s eyes. It was almost as though flames darted from them, as King cried:

“In at the windows and doors—they’ll come—all of them—together!”

And he sprang up, screaming. He beat at the air with mill-like motions, his eyes starting from his head in an ecstasy of horror. He darted over to the table and seized the knife. His cries were the kind that must live on forever. As he approached Utterbourne, he raised the knife tremblingly in the air, and said:

“If you try to leave me—I’ll kill you!”

A slight movement at the door—Utterbourne’s officers, together with Tsuda, were in the room. But Utterbourne merely stood his ground, gazing hard at the frenzied being before him, while he spoke again, in a ringing voice: “Mr. King!”

It seemed to have a calming and disarming effect. The victim shivered and breathed in noisily. His threatening pose dissolved, his arms dropping like pieces of flexible lead, while the knife clattered harmlessly on to the floor.

King staggered, and a moment later was lying on the cot. But he was not yet quiescent, for he beat at his hands furiously, and bit them, drawing blood. Muffled cries came from him on long sighs.

They beheld in his face a look of ravenous hunger. Presently a hand trembled over to the tabouret, and with fluttering fingers King took up the pipe. Even in this crazed and moribund condition he seemed to know to an exquisite fineness when the tiny browning ball had attained just the proper pitch—never the least bit burned, never toasted a shade too dry.

III

It was perhaps not so startling as kneeling on her grave and beholding her emerge from a temple; nevertheless, the entrance of Stella a few minutes later was distinctly sensational. Jerome came in just behind her—a situation complex in the extreme. As was characteristic, Utterbourne adjusted himself to it without the contraction or flurry of a single feature, and in one of his sharp, enigmatic silences.

Tsuda, after the first stupefied moment, seemed to wilt and shrink. He saw that he had been somehow outwitted. He was lost—Tsuda knew that conclusively. He did not dare look at the Captain, but stood where he was, shrinking, trembling a little. The game was up—it had been a curious conspiracy.... All at once he seemed to become a very old man.

Stella barely paused as she entered the room and the wave of almost tangible amazement broke about her. She crossed the room, her face white and unmoving, and dropped down beside the cot. She did not lay her hands upon her husband, but her words embraced him pityingly.

“Ferd—I’ve come back.”

The little spirit lamp was calmly alight, and she gazed at it with eyes in which there was nothing but misery.

King’s lips moved, though there was no sound of words. A look of ruined radiance shone in his face. Stella settled in a little heap. Her head sank on to her arms, and she uttered a soft, desperate cry.

The tragic tableau held the men about her in a state of breathlessness.

“Mrs. King,” murmured Captain Utterbourne; and there was an unmistakable element of thanksgiving in his voice.

He would have questioned her. But after all, there could not be much to say. The little spirit lamp beside the cot, and the pipe and dipper and the covered box seemed telling the story over and over each time a glance fell upon them.

Tsuda, shrunken and aged, moved almost imperceptibly round to the door. He waited until the wife of the Kami crumpled into a heap, and then, with the spell of motionless tenseness broken, he saw his way clear to slipping out into the night.

However, the gods, for whom he had always evinced so lofty an affection, were not very kind to Tsuda. It was like a run of ill luck in faro. Scarcely had he left the house, when a furious beast sprang upon his shoulders and crushed him to the ground under a storm of blows. The furious beast had once been a quiet little clerk in Market street. But much water had run under the bridge, and besides—the clerk had lost his head completely.

He was magnificent and elemental. He was mad to taste blood, and he pounded with the merciless hammer of fists which possessed little science but their full quota of untrained punishing power. One blow thrilled him profoundly. Tsuda lurched back with a groan and thrust an arm across his eyes. Then he, too, fought—furious and desperate, like a wounded jaguar, using his teeth and nails freely, and butting with his bullet-like Mongolian head. Tsuda had naturally known something of defense in his younger days, for he had considered it a good thing for a man to know how to take care of himself, even if he did expect to be a priest. They clinched and Tsuda neatly tripped his foe and they went down together in a crashing sprawl.

But somehow, by sheer force of youth and recklessness, probably, Jerome managed to capture both of Tsuda’s wrists. The man’s muscles strained and quivered, while his lusty opponent, with swift red passion in his eye now, bent to the grip, his teeth grinding. The belligerent contact intoxicated him. It was like his first champagne. It was the finishing stroke of victorious manhood.

In this position he could have broken Tsuda’s arms, and Tsuda knew it and cried out warningly. Never since the ancient day in Nemuro, when he got into a row with miners over a little dancing girl, had Tsuda been so tempestuously set upon. This time the row was not over a geisha, but the only white woman on Hagen’s Island.

Jerome felt Captain Utterbourne standing calmly yet a little grimly above them.

“He can’t get away, Mr. Stewart. Release his arms.”

So Jerome sprang up, bloody and sweaty, and stood panting. The heroic flash of melodrama was over.

And the Captain said: “We’ll take Tsuda aboard with us tonight for safe-keeping; in the morning we’ll all feel more rational. Mrs. King insists upon staying beside her husband, but we can’t leave her without protection. Sargeant—”

But Jerome broke in: “I’m staying, please. We knew each other once. We lived just around the corner from each other. I’d rather not go back to the ship tonight.” It seemed a magnificent moment.

Utterbourne stared at him, and, his lips trembling a little with devious mirth, he muttered, in almost a tone of quizzical exaltation: “Will wonders never cease?” After that there fell a pause, and then, under the stars, like the first welcome note of a returning serenity after much storm, they heard the Captain gently humming his favourite snatch of Macdowell.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
WEDDING BELLS IN THE OFFING

I

Strange forces were at work in the world; but the sun came up still and flashing out of the sea, and the birds had business of their own to attend to.

Tsuda stirred stiffly and opened his eyes; but it took him some seconds to regain his bearings. He got up slowly and rather rheumatically. His asthma seemed pretty bad this morning. He rubbed himself, and studied with rueful attention some of the badges of his fray. One eye he could only open a little way, and the flesh all about it was deeply discoloured.

Presently Sutherland came and led him to Utterbourne’s cabin, where the Captain and Tsuda remained closeted a long time. Then the others were called into conference.

“Come in, please,” the Captain called to them in his quaint sing-song. “We were just discussing—h’m?” He sat drumming on his desk with a pencil, and gazed at Tsuda in a thoughtful, detached way. His face was serious and impassive, but a wan smile flitted across it, too, in little vague waves, and he began again mildly: “We seem to be making a failure of it. We don’t seem quite to have grasped the technique—h’m?” He looked with a faintly mocking appeal from one face to another; but on Tsuda’s his gaze kept lingering, and he always drew it off with a quizzical debating wrench. “I pick up a man at sea,” the Captain went on, “and the minute I look at him I think of my island. King fell right into my hands, as though from heaven—as though from heaven,” he murmured dreamily; “and what really extraordinary qualifications he seemed to have. It doesn’t require much genius—mostly an unfailing, indescribable sense of adventure—plenty of imagination—h’m?—the sort that attains a momentum and can live on itself—you know? And an appreciation of picturesque values.... Yes, King seemed the man in a million. And we really needed him, too. He couldn’t be thought of as a luxury. What if Tsuda had suddenly got heart failure, or dropped dead of apoplexy, without another soul on the island but the Ainu? As a corporation we were always a little too close. That was our weakness. But,” he continued, “no sooner is he nicely established here than he falls victim to the thing itself! Isn’t it funny? Isn’t it simply amazing where weakness will crop out in the human animal?” There seemed almost a note of whimsical, detached, and even philosophic triumph in his voice. “With King it turned out to be opium, and with Tsuda,” he smiled like Mona Lisa, “it’s turned out to be—King’s wife!”

There was a sharp edge to his words, though he remained otherwise without passion. An expression of weariness etched itself about his mouth, and he flung out a little petulant gesture, staring at Tsuda with a sleepy gleam of reproach. Tsuda leaned forward anxiously, as Utterbourne turned to the other men in the cabin. “Rutherford—Sargeant—any suggestions? Sutherland? Do you think the island isn’t perhaps worth the candle?”

But they knew him too well to avail themselves of the extended invitation, and so merely smiled like a whole row of Mona Lisas, for they glimpsed that the Captain had already come to his decision, whatever it might prove. And it developed that they were right, for, after more characteristic word-play, and a quotation from Amiel about taking illusions seriously, Utterbourne announced, his look holding at last a devious and forgiving note: “Tsuda had thought a little of journeying to Tokyo and offering himself, because of some obligation or other, to his Emperor, for whom it seems he harbours a really touching regard; but I’ve managed to convince him that he ought to stay right on here with these people who look upon him as almost a kind of emperor himself—with due respect of course, for Cha-cha-kamui, who has such a fetching way of wearing his crown this year! Tsuda will temporarily oversee the whole business. He’s such a dangerous man that I tremble to supply him with another Kami. They’re pretty scarce, I’m afraid—like lark puddings, or the perfume of the magnifica.”

So Tsuda was escorted ashore and reinstated; and soon the tiny waterfront swarmed with Ainu. In an hour the chests of opium were coming aboard. All was hustle and bustle, and Tsuda had been instructed, as soon as the last chest was stowed, to declare a little Ainu holiday by way of celebrating the completion of the year’s work. Utterbourne had delivered a few fresh casks of sakÉ, and these promised to make the affair really memorable.

The Captain strolled up to the house of the White Kami, his soul somehow afflicted with a mood of uneasiness. The situation was certainly not all he could desire.

He entered and found King stretched out lifeless.

Stella met him at the door, and the look in her eyes—a wonderful look of sorrow and release combined—told him, even there on the threshold, that the end had come.

Soon after dawn King had called out to her very feebly; and when she reached him she knew at once that it was the end. After the long, long horror he died quite peacefully. Just at the last his brain seemed to clear. A little light crept into his eyes, making them for a moment faintly blue and round again. He half stretched out his arms, and Stella, bending down close to his lips, heard him murmur her name. He sighed a few times and was gone. They closed his eyes and folded a sheet smooth across his sunken breast which rose and fell no longer.

Stella now was tearless and calm. Her look brought a quick emotion to Jerome’s throat; and, as he entered the room, an elusive tenderness seemed to come also upon the enigmatic Captain.

“My God,” they thought they heard him say again, very softly.

There was something fugitively poetic and sublimating about it—a devious spiritual touch, as though the Captain perhaps saw, even more poignantly than Jerome, that she was a woman at length. Stella fancied there a gleam of shy sympathy, with a hitherto impregnable barrier for a fleeting instant broken down.

They buried Mr. King, just at the hour of a radiant tropical sunset, in a scented bower near the house; and they remained a little while in silence gazing at the plot of vexed earth beneath which lay all that remained of that being who had played so curious a part in the affairs of the universe.

Meantime the Ainu, uncognizant of their irreparable loss, had assembled in the house of the great chief, Cha-cha-kamui, who was present in all his grandeur, wearing the robe of red and white cloth, and on his gigantic head the crown of shavings and gilt. Outside, children played about in a noisy unimaginative way, and the women of the tribe sat on the ground working their distaffs dully. Cha-cha-kamui’s Small Wife passed among them, a little distant and haughty—for it was known that in former days the White Kami had looked with favour upon her.

Later on Tsuda would stage some sort of learned pagan ritual celebrating the return of the White Kami to the Brotherhood of the Blessed. But such processes require time—as they do in the mystic Shinshu mountains—and for the present it sufficed that there was plenty of sakÉ.

When revelry was at its height, Tsuda, who had drunk nothing and seemed very sad and cast down, slipped out of the house of the chief and away to the edge of the sea.

The Star of Troy was hoisting her anchor. Every sound was vividly audible in the hush of early evening.

He sat down in a despondent heap on the dock and leaned wearily up against the tilted derrick. In a little while there would be only a drifting plume of smoke along the horizon.

Elsa, on deck, under the festive bit of awning aft, was gazing through her glasses.

“The Ainu,” she observed, letting her eyes droop very much, “must still be carousing. There’s no one to be seen on the whole island but that Japanese. I hear you attacked him like a lot of Indians last night,” she smiled.

“Yes,” Jerome replied, “I’m afraid I was a little more noisy than the situation really called for.”

“On the contrary,” she assured him, her brown eyes full of moist yet undemonstrative appreciation, “it must have been really quite splendid. I’m sorry I had to miss it.”

“How did you spend the evening?”

“After you went ashore? Oh, I read a few chapters in my stupid book, and tried to walk myself sleepy—well, what kind of an evening would you expect me to put in, with no thrills but those I could stir up myself? And all the while you were having wild and impossible adventures—you and Stella and the Japanese and Stella’s prince.... It really seems unfair, doesn’t it? I shall never forgive the Captain for keeping me cooped up out here.” And then she added with feeling, yet very evenly: “How I hate being a woman!”

Stella watched them from a little distance. She seemed eagerly observing every detail of their conduct together, with eyes which contained only a look of quiet inevitability.

“Of course,” she murmured to herself, “it would be like that. It would have to be.”

“Do you suppose,” asked Elsa, smiling up at him in her grave, unassailable way, “you’ll be having such adventures in Tripoli?”

He shrugged, and Stella heard him laugh.

“Why not?” Stella thought. She didn’t know what they were talking about, but was merely carrying on the thread of her own speculations. “It would have to turn out some such way as this—to be quite perfect and complete. Yes, it would have to.” And in a moment she thought, with a little more agitation: “How familiar they are—like old, old friends. He finds in her all he’s missed in me. How complete! How perfect—that I should come out of it with nothing but a moral....”

Her heart was flooded with a rush of passionate regret.

They were taking turns peering through Elsa’s binoculars.

“Looks peaceful, doesn’t it, with all the palms and the sunset?”

“Yes—may I have a look?”

“Your Japanese seems rather dejected. I’m afraid you were a bit rough.”

“What would you have done under the circumstances?”

“Just what you did, I’m sure. Let’s have another peep before we are out of range.”

Slowly the Star of Troy picked her path among the reefs and wore to sea. But for a long time the figure of Tsuda, huddled on the ruined dock in the sunset, was still visible.

II

It was about eight o’clock in the evening, and Flora Utterbourne sat by a lamp in her little apartment. She was wearing the same gown she wore the day she met Mr. Curry on the way to Crawl Hill. A book lay in her lap. She was expecting some people who were to drop in and look the apartment over with an eye to subletting from her. She read a little and cut a few pages with her tiny Swiss paper knife. A small clock was ticking somewhere in shadow. It was very quiet: no sounds but the ticking of the clock and the rustle of pages. After a bit she closed the book upon a long first finger and let her head drop back against the Egyptian shawl which so beautifully disguised and enriched a very plain little second hand arm chair. She closed her eyes and sat musing.

Presently there was a ring at the door. Ah, she thought, the people to look at the apartment. And she glanced lovingly about as she went to admit them to her sanctum. The rooms were somehow so entirely hers. One would suppose she had lived here always. Everything delighted and refreshed the eye. Here one encountered the most harmonious sort of colour combination. The little drawing room illustrated the fine compatibility of cream white, Burgundy rose, quiet apple green and plum and there were delicate touches here and there of red and indigo, and even warm, bright orange. Over the little white wood mantle was an antique-looking reproduction of Burne-Jones’ familiar panel of angels on a winding stair; in a dimmer spot was a madonna of Raphael’s. Flora took it all in as she crossed, with just a tremor of wistful hesitation.

But lo! no sooner had she opened the door than she uttered an incredulous cry. Then she held out her hand, and a moment later a man had her right in his arms—a big man in a Palm Beach suit, wearing gay rings and a beautiful new shiny toupee. Curry had paused for only one thing after landing. A new toupee. He couldn’t call the way he was—it might have proved positively fatal!

Well, as one may imagine, the first quarter of an hour or so was simply indescribable. No, it is useless even to attempt it. Both talked at once nearly the whole of the time, and laughed. After that things began to quiet down a little, though there were still intermittent outbursts. How could they help themselves?

It developed that the impulsive impresario, who was behaving just exactly like a kid, hadn’t had a mouthful of dinner. There was talk of slipping out together for something; but then Flora remembered she had promised to be at home all evening on account of the people who were coming to look at the apartment. And Curry wouldn’t go out alone. He said he’d starve first. So Flora said: “Let’s go and see what there is in the ‘ice box,’ though I’m dreadfully afraid there isn’t enough to satisfy such a big hungry man!”

But behold! there was! Oh, yes—there was a really sumptuous dinner in the ice box! Flora evolved a fine crisp salad, and produced a little platter of cold chicken. She made a pot of coffee, while, under her cordial and excited directions, the impresario spread a cloth on their gate-legged table and brought out the requisite silver and china. In ever so short a time they were seated with their table between them. And Flora said that of course she couldn’t really eat a thing, but that she would just nibble a little to keep him “company.”

Her face took on a look of exaggerated, grave, and high concern as he told her more about the wreck of the Skipping Goone than it had been possible to squeeze into a cable. His eyes brimmed for a moment with the unhappy memory. But then her face lighted, for he was reminding her that, after all, here he was, safe and sound—“alive to tell the tale, though Good Lord! when the bolt struck us I never expected to be!”

Her voice was rich with happiness. “And Africa,” she laughed, “—I was ‘reading up’ on it so diligently. I thought I’d even try to go down there, since my agent says he hears there are delightful ‘apartments’ in Johannesburg!”

But Mr. Curry shook his head slowly, and his eyes looked suspiciously moist again. He was thinking of his songbirds. When he spoke there was a tone of deep sadness in his voice. “We’ve come to the end of our world tour that was going to mark such an epoch in the history of opera—” He sighed a little.

“But,” she told him warmly, “I think it has, anyhow!”

“Everything went,” he mused, “—scenery, properties—even my glorious prima donna—”

“What?” cried Flora in alarm. “Miss Valentine? She—she wasn’t drowned?”

“Oh, no,” he laughed. “Merely gobbled up by one of the big bugs, that’s all.”

She showed him, nevertheless, a face full of sympathetic despair. “It’s the most outrageous thing I ever heard of!”

But it all seemed to matter so little to him now. He seized her hands and gave her a look of such delightful impetuosity that she couldn’t help looking down at her plate.

“Don’t you see?” he cried in a loud gay voice. “It’s brought us to the way out!”

“Has it?” she asked softly.

“There’s a chance, if we hold hands tight and jump, of getting off the merry-go-round at last!”

“Oh—tell me about it!” she begged, her face brimming with eagerness.

“Well,” he said, “since I’m ruined, what’s to be done but make the best of things? There may be brighter days ahead, but right this minute things might be worse than they are. The fact is, I know of a job—it’s as leader of the orchestra in a theatre here in San Francisco. I—I believe it’s a movie theatre, but what of that? It wouldn’t last forever, and I’d keep my eyes open all the time for a chance to put over my great dream. In the meantime, though humble, the job would pay—well, enough for two to live on, I guess, if we didn’t sail too high. And at least it would be all in one place—the job, I mean—which is an advantage that couldn’t be claimed by the world tour, you see! Lord, it’s too beautiful to think of!”

And she was quite as excited and pleased as he. “Why, I’m sure we could manage, and it would really be the finest kind of adventure to have to skrimp and ‘figure,’ and I’ve a small ‘income,’ you know, from all those apartments in the East, so that if the ‘wolf’ ever actually threatened to break in, why we could sell some of the things, though of course I know,” she embroidered, “your job at the ‘movies’ couldn’t last forever, since new opportunities are sure to open up—we’ll make them!” For suddenly she remembered, and not without a quick little heartache, how he had poured out to her his big, ardent dreams that day at the Hoadley auction. “I’ll ‘back you up’ with all my might,” she said in her gracious, heartening way. “We’ll manage by ‘hook or crook’ to keep advancing, and in the meantime, we can stay right on here in this little place, which is so comfortable, though of course small, and to which I think I’ve grown more ‘attached’ than to any of the others—”

There was an interrupting ring. Her face fell.

“Oh—I’d forgotten! The people who are thinking of sub-letting....” She rose, a little upset.

But Curry kept his head—and afterward bragged of it, too. “Don’t even let ’em cross the doorstep!” he commanded, very firmly. “Tell ’em you’re out. Tell ’em you’ve changed your mind. Tell ’em anything at all, but don’t let them in!”

And when the intruders were safely disposed of, the big, joyous impresario, smiling as he certainly never smiled before in his whole life, made Flora tie one of her aprons around his waist; and he insisted on washing the dishes, while she dried them.

III

Three weeks later the Star of Troy slipped in. She never arrived with any fanfare—that was not her way.

It was agreed that Stella should go home alone, and, with such fortitude as she could summon, convey to her family the tragic aspect of this return. She preferred it that way. A cable had gone out to them from India; but nothing had been said about King, and she faced a task which brought its shudder. Better, almost better, she thought at times, to have them carry home her dead body, than to come back with things as they stood. But in her stronger moments she grimly welcomed the ordeal.

First there was just a moment of overwhelming happiness, with her father’s arms about her, and Maud stretching out her dear formless lips for a kiss, and Ted with his near-sighted eyes full of welcome behind their bright-looking glasses, and the incorrigible voice of Aunt Alice rushing pell-mell down the stairs. Stella felt as though she could not endure the almost terrible happiness, while it lasted. And then—

Well, she slumped down into a chair and told them about her husband. She spoke of him tensely, yet her voice was not clouded with blame. She cried a little. And then she was in her father’s arms again, and all he could say was: “Stella—Stella....”

After that life settled down in the house. Stella gradually took up her old duties, quietly and gratefully; yet she could not quite believe, sometimes, that the long, long horror was forever still. Her nights at first were troubled, even terrible; and by day, she never smiled.

Jerome fell easily into the way of dropping in to spend an evening. He held them all breathless with his multiple adventures, though the darker phases were not touched upon.

At first he and Stella were but little alone together. He had become, it would seem, just a good comfortable friend of the family, and his tongue was always gayest when they were all assembled in the cosy back parlour. She felt his aloofness, as she had felt it first on that far-off night in the temple, though it was warmer now, and somehow less oppressively personal. Yet this way, to Stella, it seemed an even harder thing to face. His unfailing cheerfulness and that most amazing worldly nonchalance seemed thrusting their destinies ever farther and farther apart. Her tragedy seemed indeed complete. Had he really fallen in love with Elsa? she asked herself. And the answer was always the same, patiently, inevitably: “It would be like that. It would have to be.”

One evening, however, a curious change came. Jerome and Stella were sitting out together on the front steps. He had been gay as usual an hour ago in the back parlour; but now, here in the thoughtful dark, seemed sunk in a deep realm of reverie. As a matter of fact, Jerome was busy with far-flung conjecture. There was a good deal to plan—his whole life, for that matter, which, at his age, represented a contract of no mean proportions. The Mediterranean project was definitely on, and in two weeks Jerome would depart for Tripoli—and the Lord knew what! It was immensely exciting. It seemed the dawn of a real career for him.

He had been perhaps a little more worldly than usual tonight; but now his mood seemed to warm and soften. “Stella,” he began, then hesitated, and ended by reaching out and taking her hand. He held it a long time in silence.

At last he began to speak, his voice a little husky with new emotion. Stella felt her heart respond in a dumb, incredulous way. But he had said only a few words when an unexpected interruption occurred.

A smart little car darted up and stopped, and out of it came Elsa with a boyish bound, which had about it, however, a certain trim and self-sufficient grace. Stella drew her hand gently out of Jerome’s warm clasp, and they rose to welcome the newcomer.

There was a very faint and echoy trace of the old romantic flutter in Stella’s voice as she suggested they go into the parlour. But Elsa, in her cool, blunt, even subtly tactless way, would not hear of it. “I like it much better outside, and anyway I can only stop a minute. I’m picking up dad at the club.”

She gazed at Jerome, just an instant, somewhat queerly; and then she gazed at them both without any expression at all. Her heart was not without its emotion—but emotion so jealously guarded that no one on earth could possibly hope to obtain the slightest clue to it.

She sat down with them on the steps and talked of trivial things. Jerome was unexpectedly silent. Finally she turned to him, drawling:

“You’re getting to be an awful stranger over our way. I suppose the journey scares you out.”

And before he could make any reply at all, she had turned calmly back to Stella with unrelated matters, her tone just a shade too eager, perhaps, to be quite worthy of the established Utterbourne imperturbability.

When she was gone, Stella mused: “Elsa never changes. She’s always just the same.” And then, on an undercurrent of dark brooding: “It must be wonderful to be able to go through life that way,” the woman tensely murmured.

“I suppose so,” replied Jerome, not quite at his ease still, but behaving more normally now the other girl had departed.

Stella almost surrendered, right on the spot, to a throbbing impulse to ask him: “What is Elsa to you, and what are you to her?” But she merely sat silent; and in a way perhaps more convincing than any words, the unformed query was answered, after a moment or two, by Jerome’s gently seeking her hand again.

“Jerome....” she faltered, but her look was growing almost radiant.

“Stella, dear....” His voice was husky once more. “I love you.”

And then everything seemed altered, and she said, because she simply couldn’t help it: “Jerome—I thought it was—I thought you loved Elsa....”

He smiled, reminiscent and a little grave. “If things had turned out differently with you, there might have come a time.... You see we met just when I felt—well, when I felt, or thought I did, about everything a good deal the way she did. I don’t know....” But after a tiny silence he ended, very simply: “As it is, I only want you, Stella.”

And then—oh, well, it was a wonderful night. Love seemed to rush back and overwhelm them. It was far more thrilling than anything in the old days, yet it was all very quiet and simple.

Bracing himself just a little, and in secret glad of the dark, Jerome told her the rest about Lili, while she turned wide eyes upon him and listened. He kept nothing back, because—well, because it was such a wonderful night; and besides, he had a feeling that the foundations of their whole future happiness were, in a sense, being laid now, and there must be no false masonry. At first it seemed so strange to her that she couldn’t speak.

He wondered, a little darkly, what was passing in her mind. There were misgivings; but at length she gave his hand a pressure, and she said:

“I see, Jerome. I’m glad you told me.”

Naturally, after that, he breathed more easily. And then he went on talking about all the things that had gone to make up the fabric of his life since it was sundered from hers. He poured out to her the love that had been in his heart for the little son they had had to leave at sea, and felt her sympathy, warm and intimate. A glow seemed to envelop them both.

Here they were, on the steps, holding hands—just as in the old days, only of course now it was all more wonderful. Strange, they thought—so strange: somehow as though the tiny seed of return had been present even in that dark and groping lovers’ quarrel up Market street....

She snuggled against him softly. Thoughts of the new life just setting in flooded her heart with solemn happiness. She watched the dim trees stirring in the night wind. Stella was quite as far from Irmengarde as before. Alas, she would never be like Irmengarde, after all. But she didn’t care. And when it came to life and the serious facts of living—good heavens! she had had experiences that would make Irmengarde faint right away and never come to again.

She leaned against Jerome’s shoulder in a happy, tired way. Life had snatched them up and set them down again. Yes, life had played pranks with them both, as life will sometimes—incredibly or not, it makes no difference; tragically or absurdly, there remains nothing to be said. And Jerome grasped his happiness, too.

“Somehow,” she said, her voice all warmth and tenderness, with a touch of humour also, at last, “I wish you weren’t going away, but were going to get back your old job at Oaks-Ferguson’s!” And for the first time, almost, since that night the little dinner wasn’t eaten—Stella smiled. “But I know,” she went on humorously, “you’d never be happy there again, and—well, as soon as you can come back to marry me, I’ll be ready to go away with you.”

“Back to Tripoli?” he murmured, his eyes full of love, but touched also with ambitious, worldly dreams.

“Wherever the work takes you,” she said.

Then there came a subtle twinkle in his eye, and, though with great tenderness, he couldn’t resist reminding her: “You used to talk so much about visiting Paris. Some day—well, some day, you know, it might be even that—you never can tell, Stella. Wouldn’t it be funny,” he laughed, “to think of us living in Paris!”

They kissed, like children, without embracing.

And just as he went away, he pressed a ring into her hand. “I know you don’t want to wear it now,” he said, “but just keep it where you can look at it sometimes. It will help you to remember. And later on,” he added, “we’ll trade it in at Ascher’s for a bigger stone. But the man told me that it’s a good little diamond, at that, for its size.”