Julie had received a note from Calmiden. “We will cross the causeway to-night,” it said.

She waved back the toiling future generations of light, and took the note to the window. What did it mean? The few lines managed to convey a message quite beyond their import. She read them over and over, then gazed across the white winding road and the green banana trees, to the causeway lying like a high thoroughfare between two worlds. Was to-day to be the last of an old existence, which she was to shed like a discarded garment? Would the footsteps that had followed strange paths in the East turn about completely, and the dream that had burned in her soul be left forever unfulfilled?

The breeze swayed the sacred tree of India beneath the window, and its golden incense full of mystic and exhilarating intimations showered upon the air. Julie was carried on the wave of its magic to a roof garden in Manila and the hero who had first overwhelmed the horizon of her youth. Often, looking out on this glowing landscape, she had seen this image, but more and more as something lost in the swift passage of life.

She, would not see him any more. Fate, that fate which ruled this world had arranged it so. Her destiny lay along the beaten paths of the world. She was too small an atom, as Calmiden had said, to survive the great chances of the coming upheaval, or to dare ever, ever to achieve a force like Barry McChord’s. His spirit had lighted areas of her life tremendously. Nobody ever had so stirred or quickened the pulse of her soul. But that spirit was receding before the hard facts of existence that Nahal had brought. It was getting too terribly hard, with so much pressing upon her, to inhabit two spheres. And if anybody in the North had given her a thought again, he had not taken the trouble to make it known. She had dropped completely out of those great activities, and not a reverberation of her life or its yearnings had reached the far-off goal of her city of dreams. She herself shrinking to her real, insignificant dimensions.

The tangle of her affairs complicated all her thought, and sent a chill wave over her. The cold, hard, insuperable fact of her debts! She owed the merchants in Solano, the small merchants of her village, and still, after the lapse of many months, she owed Mrs. Morris a huge obligation. Finally, and very nearly the worst of all, there was the desperate debt in which Purcell was involved. A pauper and a gambler with life! How else could a person who had managed to put herself in everybody’s debt be called? Clearly she had demonstrated that she could not handle her own life, to say nothing of playing a part in that complex organization to which she had had the assumption to aspire.

A great agitation came over her when in that one solemn final moment she looked into her soul and bade good-by to all she had come to do. Slowly she began to efface and obliterate the old orders of life, and the transcendent consecration of the past. The East to which she had come with a torch became a mere drear fact of over-powering millions. Ages, and the tried souls of many men would be offered up before the East found its freedom. What she did or did not do could not weigh in the infinite balance.

Slowly she turned back to the room. The brown gnomes were sweating terribly in the throes of composition, mining the realms of thought for a few throttled ideas. Never anywhere were they so dearly born. Julie stopped still to stare at them. “Poor little generation of light!” she murmured.

Delphine glanced up at her with his quick brown eyes. He was the barometer of the class—a youthful personality that had escaped the general languor of the race. He watched the other boys, and interpreted their needs. He seldom sat in his seat, but was, with his books under his arm, almost always in a state of itinerant education. He had been a devotee of the betel-nut, but at Julie’s solicitation had given it up.

The children marched out at the end of the morning session. Julie thrust her note in her pocket, and was following after them when Delphine, trailing by a string a big bright red tropical beetle, stopped her.

“You stay here always, Maestra? You never go away?” he urged earnestly.

Julie glanced at him absently. “Go home, Delphine,” she said gently.

“Here,” said the boy, “is a present for you of this beautiful bug—if you will not go.”

“No, thank you, Delphine. I know it would break your heart to give up Balthazar, though he bites nasty welts all over you all the time.”

But Delphine stuck along after her.

A quickening of her being took place as she came out into the street. After all, she was in the golden possession of life. She picked some heavily fragrant flowers and thrust them in her hair. She was young, and Calmiden was young.

She moved along in the light like the heart of the golden day, her shimmering head lifted to the perfume of the Ylang-Ylang, and a hundred visions stirring in her brain. Behind her unperceived, Delphine and the scarlet splendor of Balthazar desolately trailed.

In the evening she donned the green dress; but as she slipped the green bracelet over her wrist, a sinister shadow swept for a moment upon her mood.

A lithe white figure appeared in the road. She went out to meet it. She had never seen Calmiden when he was so beautifully grave. She walked along beside him. Neither of them spoke.

They went down to the beach, where leaving the village behind they walked silently along the shore. The water washed darkly on clean white sand with the beat and rhythm of a majestic poem of which their emotions supplied the motive. They pressed on through the starlit hush till the causeway lay directly before them.

Wonderful lighted bridge! Water from great distances bore up on either bank, and in mighty rushes took itself off again into space. When the moonlight sprinkled through the darkness, this narrow shining strip stood aloft over the fretted world.

As they started to cross it, Julie said: “I feel as if I were suspended between heaven and earth! I hope I won’t drop.”

“Are you afraid?”

They stopped short. With the turbulence of passion the water was hurling darkly about them. The land appeared to be groups of mystic shadows, and the stars were down almost within reach.

“It’s all said around me,” Calmiden declared in an unsteady voice. “I have loved you from the first, and I shall always love you. Nothing can change that.”

An agitating vibration passed through Julie’s body. Was this the hour of fulfillment, toward which she had been moving like a star?

“Promise me,” he urged, “that you will belong to me forever, that you will go with me out of this poisonous East.”

“Of course,” she said; “of course,” speaking like one in a dream. “Why, are you too afraid that something might happen?”

“We could be married soon, and have done with all fears.”

Julie started perceptibly. Her thoughts had never traveled that far. Marriage seemed vaguely a sort of risk to her emotion.

“Why can’t we go on for a while as we are—till you are ordered away?” she queried nervously. “It is so perfect as it is.”

“But my existence is so uncertain! And why should you continue to be flung around in this whirlpool? Some one should look out for you.”

“Because I am such a little fool that I can’t look out for myself? Oh, let us wait till the end of my term. I came out here, you see, really to do something—and I am so soon to drop it all!” An unconscious anguish crept into her voice.

“I believe this country has put a spell upon you, or you wouldn’t be putting me off.”

They were walking now along the causeway. The island ahead of them lay like a sable mesh of mystery, with midnight archways through its dense foliage. Startling creepers, like multiform arms of an unseen body, groped over the heart of the earth. A sad fragrance floated out to them. Once or twice the moonlight making bold with the forest lit up its stilly beautiful chambers.

Julie made a sudden startled movement. “There is somebody over there! He is stirring along under the trees. He looks all black. He is watching us! Come away!” She dragged frantically at Calmiden’s hand.

He hesitated, his gaze strained into the darkness.

“Don’t you see that you are only one man—with only one pistol? There may be a lot of men in there.” She pulled him back.

He yielded at last. “I’ve got you to look out for,” he muttered.

They ran swiftly back over the causeway, a target they well knew for any one who might wish to shoot.

“I was a fool to take you to such a place!” Calmiden exclaimed when they had reached the other end in safety.

“I am sure it was the priest!” Julie panted. “Where rather than to that Eleusian island would that dark spirit go? Those black trees just ached with the hatred of that Lucifer soul. Over there, he plots to stir up discord among men. There on that ground that he has made forbidding with supernatural tales he plans insurrections.”

“I wonder how many rifles he’s got stored away over there,” Calmiden said.

Then he sighed. “We didn’t get across the causeway, after all!”