While Julie was dealing, in a splendid glow, with the affairs of the universe, her own mundane concerns, she was uneasily aware, were urgently in need of attention. She retired one night to her room, with the jungle closing up about it, and the jungle’s wild creatures rustling but a few feet away, to do some deep worldly thinking. From her trunk she took the book in which she fitfully kept accounts, and calculated furiously for some time, going over the inexorable figures.

Suddenly she dropped the pencil, and sank back in her chair, staring somberly into the night. Its blackness swept up to the grated bars of the windows, and peered in at the solitary, harassed figure in the cell.

Not one dollar of the hundreds she owed Mrs. Morris had been paid back. That very first, sacred responsibility her new life had assumed! In Manila, money had unconsciously spent itself. Then, there had been the expenses of the trip South. But bitterest fact of all, the splendid wardrobe, the cause of all this trouble, had bit by bit, impalpably and detestably, as if under an evil incantation, been giving way. Dresses cracked explosively, at the touch, and silk stockings, however prayerfully drawn on, disintegrated into an elemental snarl of thread. What the elements did not demolish, the cockroaches, nearly as big as mice and scrambling deftly all over the room, voraciously devoured.

Julie sat and burned with dishonor over her affairs. She felt as abased as if she had become the actual chattel of her far-away creditor. She would have resorted to any expediency to keep this bondage from being made public. The Dreschells had an unconscionable pride. Mr. Dreschell had brought up his family on the theory that borrowing money was only a shade less reprehensible than stealing it. This obligation was the Debt of England to Julie’s soul. With her small salary, how, she pondered, was it to be worked out?

She had in her trunk one month’s salary. Every bit should go to the woman whose peon she had become. In forgetting her own further necessity to exist, she was acting with characteristic feminine recklessness. There being no post-office at Guindulman, Julie rolled up the bills neatly, put them in an envelope, and addressed it to Mrs. Morris. Thereupon her mental processes took quite a leap. She arose with a shade even of self-satisfaction. It was splendid to be an independent integer of the world—to handle your own destiny—to say nothing of your own money—unafraid.

Into the midst of these cogitations came the Calcedos’ muchacho, to announce a young man.

“What young man?” Julie demanded particularly.

“El Teserero!” the muchacho declared.

Julie dropped back flatly in her seat. Since the uncomfortable and startling moments on the boat, she had contrived never to meet the Treasurer alone. She knew how dissatisfied with this he had been, and that in the midst of his activities planned to supersede the Governor in power, he had been lying in wait for his opportunity. She could see no way out of the encounter, and fortified herself for it as she ascended the stairs to the sala.

The Treasurer held her hand an instant and regarded her closely with his odd light eyes. The surprisingly sun-burnt face wore a look that sobered her. She indicated a chair.

Mr. Purcell demurred. “Let’s go out on the balcony,” he suggested, regarding with disapproval the publicity of their surroundings.

“Oh, I think I should rather remain here,” she replied lightly.

“You don’t object to going out there with the others,” he reproached.

“There are several of them,” Julie explained.

“How about Calmiden, and—others,” he probed with jealous meaning.

Julie started slightly. How had he managed to be so well informed concerning her movements?

“Why do you avoid me?” he demanded. “Do you think all these men are your friends? Wait and find out. Now, I am serious. I care for you truly, as I told you on the boat. I asked you to marry me; and I mean it still—in spite of your evasions.”

“Please don’t!” Julie begged. “You couldn’t possibly have meant it—after those few hours.”

She recalled her refusal—so adroit and impersonal, in which her altruistic aspirations and her inviolate determination not to marry had been calculated to carry conviction. She had wanted to regard the matter as settled, yet here he was more determinedly possessive than ever.

“You did not dream that I had given up?” he demanded.

“I beg of you to do so! I refuse utterly!”

“Don’t say anything you’ll be sorry for later,” he broke in. “Things are all your way now, but wait till they turn—till you find out none of those fellows mean anything, and the bottom falls out of your air-castle. Then you won’t say that.”

Julie stared at him in resentful amazement. “Mr. Purcell,” she exclaimed, “I don’t understand this conversation. You don’t at all love me. You have merely set your will upon me, and are trying to frighten me. Please never reopen this subject.” She rose. “It is, so far as I am concerned, definitely and completely closed.”

“You’ll regret that!” he exclaimed agitatedly.

“Have you threatened me enough?” Julie was frantically angry now.

She was aghast at the purpose that gathered in his face as he replied: “I do not wish to threaten you, but I have not given up.”

He descended the staircase, leaving Julie with her breast heaving.

That wretched voyage! Had men gone mad in this queer land, that they would ask a girl to marry them on a day’s acquaintance, and to this staggering casualness add the brigand intention to seize her if she refused? According to this doggedly unpleasant young man, he had put a mortgage upon her that he meant at some time to exact. How many more people were to advance claims on her life?

To rid her mind of this uncomfortable visitor she turned, on going downstairs, in the direction of Miss Hope’s room. The cheerful light shed through the partly open door drew her forward. As she climbed the three steps that lifted the room from the ground, she caught a glimpse of Mr. Brentwood’s white starched back. She started to retreat, but the young man, turning quickly at the sound of her footsteps, caught sight of her.

“Why are you always out when I come to see you?” he reproached, smiling with his white teeth through his carefully brushed mustache. “I tried to call on you to-night.”

“I wasn’t out,” Julie moodily replied, remembering how much she had wished to be. “I was upstairs.”

Mr. Brentwood directed upon Miss Hope a peculiar look. “Come in!” he hospitably insisted. “I can still see you.”

Julie’s evil star beckoned her on. Miss Hope offered no remark as she took a chair. Mr. Brentwood, promptly facing around to Julie, proceeded to direct toward her the fullest extent of his charms, and succeeded for once in being truly entertaining. Julie, eager to forget her experience with Purcell, dropped gladly into a sprightly discourse, and both of them forgot utterly the rigid figure of the vestal virgin, which opposite them began to steam with wrath.

After they had laughed together for some time, Mr. Brentwood bade Julie a lingering good-night, calling back a careless adieu to the shape in the background.

Julie turned to Miss Hope, but stopped short before the spectacle of that lady who, having come out of the shadows, was positively trembling with inconjectural passion. Her indefinite features seemed to melt into a boiling lava, which strangely her face appeared to be. Her blue eyes vehemently shot flames. Julie watched, with interested daring, the forthcoming eruption.

“Miss Dreschell,” cried Miss Hope, bursting with wrath, “you will seek quarters elsewhere. Do you suppose it is entertaining for me to sit here all evening while you monopolize my friends! Mr. Brentwood was my friend, Miss Dreschell,”—in rising crescendo—“until you came. My room and the Calcedos’ sala have other purposes than the accommodation of the crowd of young men with which you seem to find it necessary to surround yourself. Moreover, natives of the better class have a sense of propriety, and it is not edifying to them to watch your friends—and their caresses.”

Julie stared incredulously. Then a realization of what Miss Hope must mean flashed through her. Evidently she had seen in the dusk under her window the wind-up of a gay tender little adventure with Terry O’Brien before he returned to command his mountain fastness at Tarlac. It was never, Julie knew, to come to anything, and had involved only a shadowy caress.

“But the Calcedos haven’t said anything of the kind!” Julie objected with rising anger.

“They will say so. They have some cousins coming to visit them,” Miss Hope declared, pointing positively in the direction of the door. She closed it sharply on Julie’s outraged back, leaving the girl to grope her way through the dark. Julie got to the entrance, and stood there staring indignantly into the night.

It was a charming night, all the worlds of the universe spinning gayly up above her through the light of myriads of suns. It must be really a very small concern to Uranus or to Neptune, where a hundred years are as one, whether the atom called Miss Hope or the atom called Purcell were angry or not. As for the atom called Julie dancing headlong through space—was it even remotely possible that somewhere, some place, any one atom tremendously counted? Was there a law that held over those great worlds and their activities? And must one conform to it? But how, with mystery on every side, were you to find the law? Had she, because Purcell was not so pleasing as the others, been intolerant of him? She had not been angry at the sentimental intimations of the others. She had, in fact, poetically enjoyed them. And Miss Hope—although she was, according to Julie, terribly old, might she not still cling through a thousand yearning desires to the magic garment of youth?

Julie was not sure concerning all these speculations. A strange consciousness seemed to be speaking through her, a consciousness that saw things from all angles, but which only occasionally broke into utterance.

The approach of a tall, familiar figure put a stop to this metaphysical trend of thought.

“I came once before,” Calmiden announced; “but I heard you in there with Miss Hope, so I decided to come back later. Come take a walk as far as the steps of the convento.”

“It’s getting late,” Julie demurred.

“What does it matter? Look at the night!”

Julie regarded it, and capitulated. They strolled up the road that led to the upper part of the village. Street lights were sparse and dim in Guindulman. The avenue was almost closed overhead by the prodigal foliage of mango trees, and blackened with the soft, thick darkness of the tropics; yet to-night it was meteorically lighted by myriads of fire-flies shimmering in the branches.

Julie threw up her head in wonder at the transfiguration. Everything had become unreal. The avenue was like a road in fairy-land. The convento, white as driven snow in the moonlight, rose from its high tier of steps above them, like an ancient temple.

To the left was the Major’s ogre-like retreat. Mike, routed from his roost in the trees by this intolerable illumination, was snarling and lashing through the branches like an imp of darkness.

This little gargoyle had been deliberately installed in this tree commanding the entrance to his office by the Major, and Hell itself could not have been more ferociously guarded by Cerberus. Men could come and men could go; but to the whole female race Mike stuck out his whiskered jaw in challenge. He might be swinging by his tail, ever so happy and carefree, in the branches, but let a daughter of Eve, however secretly, steal up to the portal of the omnipotent Major, and he was down upon her with a thud, wildly rending her garments.

“Wild little beast!” Julie disapprovingly declared, moving out of range of his chain. The monkey, like some monster of elf-land, thrust his grotesque little head out of a nimbus of fire-flies. He scratched them out of his eyes, and securing them cunningly in his wicked little paws, bolted them with rapt relish.

“Horrible!” Julie cried. “And they were lighting up the world!”

“He’s rather handy to have round, though,” Calmiden hardily declared. “You see I am Quartermaster, and people want to bother one with such a multitude of senseless things.”

They mounted the terraced steps, which in a sheer drop fell from the walls of the convento. “Look!” Julie pointed high above them. On the aerial gallery of the convento, a black cassock loomed stark against the night, a solitary brooding figure staring at the stars. Once it bent intently to regard the two young persons.

“Poor fellow!” Calmiden exclaimed.

“Why?” At sight of the priest a cloud had come over Julie’s mood.

“He’s so solitary, by race and vocation. He’s only half white, and only half a man. He might as well be a magus up there in his tower, for all the participation he has in human living. Wouldn’t you be lonely if the gates of your soul’s territory were closed against you, if you were forbidden to love—ever? He has fire in his eyes, our padre. He wasn’t made to tend altars on high mountains.”

“It’s my firm conviction,” Julie declared, “that he tends very assiduously the fires of the insurrection. He hates us; he hates all white men.”

“Because we are what but for a little slip of fate he might have been. The tragedy, the wickedness of these racial Lucifers flung down to a lower world!”

“Do you know,” Julie said soberly, looking up at the Priest’s tower, “I fancy the padre doesn’t like me. These people don’t understand our women—the woman who walks through the world alone. To them she is an object of suspicion; to their mind her liberty signifies licence. For instance, to-night I oughtn’t to be here—and he’s looking down on me.”

“What does it matter what they think? So far as I am concerned they don’t exist. I am just serving my time,”—he closed his lips tightly; “counting the moments till I can get out and go home.”

A brooding distant look came into the girl’s eyes.

“To pass in and pass out? What good can that do? One should put the plow into the soil and not abandon it.”

“I should think you’d want to get clear of the uncleanliness of this territory of Baal. I’ve seen enough raw, bestial nature over here to make my soul revolt. The standards civilization has fought for go by the board here. One must be forever on the lookout in the heart of half savage society to keep from relapsing.”

“Just you wait till my boys grow up. Then there’ll come a change.”

“Good God! You don’t purpose staying over here till then?”

The girl looked steadily into the night. “If I did the right thing I’d stay. My little brown men lifted into the citizenship of the world!” she murmured.

“Come down from your perch in the skies. What a dreamer you are—and what a life to fling carelessly away! It belongs to somebody or other.”

“Nobody gives up anything anymore,” Julie went on. “The renunciation that built up the world is going out of it. Upon whose shoulders, if not upon ours, is the foundation of the New World to rest? Isabel called me Atlas, and I have been so happy holding up my little end.”

“It is terrible to speak of spending the years of your life here. You don’t at all know what you are talking about. You don’t know orientals. Wait till you see China, a half dead amoeba sprawling over the earth. You will be overwhelmed by the spectacle of humanity getting nowhere at all—just crawling along the surface of the globe, like worms. Some day you will wrest yourself out from these sunken millions in fearful prayer to get back to your own kind. Oh, don’t you feel the darkness, the despair of it? There will never be any renaissance of the East—for to have a renaissance you must have a soul.”

“But we are trying to make the start here—that the fire may travel.”

“Among these inconsequential little swaggerers? Even China, with her art and her senile one-man kind of learning, has them beaten miles. My soul is sick of the whole debased East, I tell you; and I despise this beastly hot-house of an archipelago that spawns existence in such hideous profusion. I am no colonist, no pioneer, ever. I am just a soldier, to restore order and pass on.”

“And you don’t care at all about the great struggle, that is commencing, everywhere over here? Ah, I can feel it,” she cried, “—the powers of Light against the powers of Darkness!”

Calmiden regarded her with profound feeling. “You are terribly young to be here alone.”

“And already I have made two enemies,” she said with a change of mood. “The very first of my life!” she reflected ruefully.

He knitted his brows. “I don’t like to think of your having enemies in this country.”

“They sprang up like a simoon in the desert. I was angry for a bit, but I can’t nurse a real good hatred in my soul for five minutes. It just peters out, and of course that puts me at a frightful disadvantage.”

A swift change came over the young man’s face, an inflexible sheath changing it into a mask of steel. “I can stay angry forever,” he said, frowning into the night. “I don’t mean that I have merely a bad temper. My mind simply will not expurgate an affront. I love and I hate for good,” he declared with concentrated passion.

Julie drew away a little.

“Oh, but why dwell on such things, you and I?” he went on. “All this would not have come out if you had not stirred to the bottom, where the truth dwells. I may be violent underneath, and hard with those who injure me, but there are any number of things to which I am inflexibly true. I am as inexorable one way as the other. I despise weakness of all kinds, and it is weak to let people hurt you. I don’t care what anybody says, if you let a person hurt you lie will despise you into the bargain. It’s too bad, but I can’t be changed—and I’m glad somehow that I made a clean breast of it to you.”

“You frighten me a little by the order that is all through you. Even your sins appear to have unity, whereas I keep house topsy-turvily in my innermost being. I have nothing filed there. I don’t know what will flash out at any moment. I am camping in the universe—and having for the present a tremendous time. Some policeman will come along some time and take me in because I haven’t built a house in creation. But just now there is adventure, and the glory of being alive under the tents of Kedar.”

She smiled up at the moon. “I wonder where I am heading?” she exclaimed. Her glance dropped, she stopped talking, and her face lit up softly; her attention claimed by something she seemed to see off in dusky space. Calmiden watched her for some moments where she stood on the step of the old convent with the moonlight flowing over her like a timeless river.

“What are you seeing off there?” he asked.

“Faces! Faces—startling ones that I saw in Manila—made by the New World. I often think and wonder about them—about one, more often!”

“A man’s!” Calmiden echoed blankly.

“A god’s—with the heart of all the world beating in his breast.”

“And you think about him!” he exclaimed in gloomy dissatisfaction.

The girl roused herself. “It was only the encounter of an instant,” she mused wistfully. “It would be very foolish to think of just one moment out of one’s life, would it not?”

She turned suddenly, for the thought had surged over her again that she had not in any way heard from Manila since she had left it behind—that in the busy, brilliant lives into which she had fluttered for an instant she was not even a recollection. Apparently in these strenuous times it was every man to his own road! She had chosen her road—but she had never ceased to remember those beautiful days and nights.

“Good night,” she told the young man. “I must go now.”

Before she went to bed, she put out her light and, wrapped in the thick darkness, stared out on the swaying groves. Far down the avenues her gaze pierced, as if some message were stirring toward her from off there. Soon she was asleep, close to the evil, perfumed earth.

As Julie went pondering along the golden dust-powdered road, she was confronted at the convent steps by Anna Anastasia, the Priest’s mother, who accosted her with the freedom of manner that was part of her efflorescent personality.

Once long ago Anna Anastasia had been pretty enough to ensnare the attention of a rich young Spanish official. The Priest was the issue of their irregular alliance, and against its consequences his soul perpetually rebelled. This light, fluid creature had inexorably fixed his fate. The desires of her soft little body had made him what he must unchangeably remain. Far from being a Magdalene, however, Anna Anastasia, as the mother of the Priest, occupied in this elastic human community a position of almost religious eminence.

Nodding sociably at the girl, she said in Spanish: “I’ve been told you seek accommodations.”

Julie looked harassed. Had she not been everywhere unsuccessfully over this crowded town and finally been advised amazingly by the Governor to marry the Teserero in order to put an end to her troubles?

“It’s maddening,” she replied, pushing her damp blond hair from her brow, “but there seems to be none to be had!”

The SeÑora smiled archly. “Quite true; there are none. It seems a shame that so young and so charming a seÑorita should be distressed. I am lonely!” she exclaimed. “It is not,”—she shrugged her shoulders—“the pleasantest living in the world with Raoul. If he could become more human—if he would find something to take his black thoughts off himself, and off me! Would you believe it, SeÑorita, he keeps me a close prisoner—me who am but thirty-eight? Many women marry, and have lovers still, very suitably, at my age. Always he makes life hell by demanding, ‘Why did you do it?’ Why indeed! It would be well for him to see that it is not easy to resist. His father was a cavalier. You can see it in Raoul, who is so tall and strong and beautiful, as you are. Raoul is of a higher race.

“Come to live with me in the convento, and I will give you every comfort. Things must be made easier for me, SeÑorita; truly they must. I should love Raoul to go through purgatory—to learn that outside his breviary there is a heaven and a hell.”

Julie stood turning color under a mixture of violent emotions. This impossible and monstrously unconcerned woman actually expected an answer to her unthinkable proposal. But even in the midst of suffocating emotions, Julie remembered that she must be careful of giving offense to so powerful a person. “It is inconceivable!” she exclaimed, drawing away.

“But why, SeÑorita? You like men. There are always many around you. It was so too with me. Make Raoul eat the dust!” Her face set into passionate lines of hatred.

Julie stared dumbfounded at the woman who claimed her as a sister spirit. “This is horrible,” she breathed.

“My son says you are beautiful, but that you are evil. The other seÑorita, he says, is too old for sin. You see that he is very harsh.”

Julie was trembling now. “SeÑora,” she said, “it is too much.” She hurried back to her jungle room, clenching her hands, and letting the angry tears flow.

That afternoon, Maria Tectos, the Old Maid of Guindulman, one of the most noteworthy personages of the village, not only as the possessor of considerable wealth but as the acknowledged leader among the women, hailed Julie as the girl trudged by. She offered Julie a room in her large house, which was the best and most unique mansion in the town.

It was distinctly a compliment, Julie understood, to be invited to join this exclusive household. The Old Maid had been to a school in Manila; moreover, with her ultra-modern, tremendous, iron-gray pompadour shaking always like a tower with her laughter, she would be a jolly companion. She believed, so she was always averring to Julie, in the complete freedom of her sex; and she was constantly stirring the women up to one thing or another; but this feministic progressiveness unfortunately carried along with it the conservatism of old age. The exactions the Old Maid imposed would leave Julie none of that liberty the Old Maid extolled. Julie could see her young men friends only under the Old Maid’s eye; and it became clear that everything would be done to discourage altogether their foolish visits. The Old Maid pointed out her own successful single, elderly state as a contrast to that of her companions.

After the sinister proposition of the morning, and the accompanying insinuations, the Old Maid’s invitation seemed a real elucidation of her problem. The view of her entertained by Anna Anastasia and the priest was peculiar to their own dark minds. The others knew that she had come here to give all she could. But it was troublesome that their appreciation of conventions so disproportionately exceeded their realization of ethics. These people whose Atlas she had come to be, might not at all understand her living alone, as she had been thinking of doing, in a little house which she had discovered she could rent. Perhaps, after all, since she had made this her particular task, and was getting really to have quite a hold on some of the people, she had better accept the Old Maid’s stringent proffer. So with a strange feeling that this decision would be ultimately critical, she told the Old Maid that she would come.

When she returned from school at five o’clock, Calmiden stood waiting outside the closed Headquarters.

“You’re late,” he exclaimed, coming toward her. “I’ve been waiting some time.”

Julie regarded him gravely. “I’m tired,” she said. “Finding a roof for one’s head is harder than I thought it was. You know that Miss Hope has made the Calcedos put me out. I’ve been everywhere, and had the strangest things said to me—” She paused gloomily. “But I’ve succeeded at last.”

“Where are you going?” he demanded quickly.

“To Maria Tectos. She has offered to take me in. She is very powerful, and I shall be very comfortable, but—”

“What?”

“She has made stipulations. She does not approve of my seeing men alone, or walking out with them.”

“Well, you told her you wouldn’t go to her, of course.”

“I told her I would.”

Calmiden stopped short with a forcible exclamation. “Why, she will never let us see each other! I say, you are not going to let that happen? Do you want to give up life completely, sit up alone night after night in the dusk among the palms in this desolate bit of jungle? You don’t know what it is, I tell you—this dark alien land. Every atom of it makes you feel your abandonment. This country’s not for women anyway. It’s for armed marching men. I can’t think how you dropped into it. How did you?”

Julie started. “I think—somebody said something to me once on a roof top.”

“Well, I am talking to you now from the ground floor. Life is short enough anyway, and you propose to cut off all its possibilities by burying yourself in the wilderness even more effectually than you have done already. Why it’s insulting the high gods who made you the lovely being you are. Maria Tectos—and all the natives be dashed when they try to dictate your mode of living!”

Julie stood looking soberly down into the dust of the sun-burnt road. The life of a hermit on the island of Nahal! Could one even for the most inexorable principles endure it?

“It’s beginning to get awfully hard!” She sighed. “Sometimes I long so to go back to Manila—I really had no idea of being so completely put out of the world. I thought I should work very hard, and win my certificate to title among the Builders. There appeared to be very little real work left for me in Manila—and it didn’t seem fair to play safe over courses already won. But I really didn’t expect to be so cut adrift.”

She straightened up, and smiled.