From his upper state chambers, the Major was beckoning to Julie with as much excitement as that statuesque personality was capable of manifesting.

“Come up a minute,” he called. “I have great news for you!”

As Julie entered the room he greeted her with a smile that thawed every line of his stony visage.

“The insurgents will surrender in Guindulman next Thursday,” he told her. “They will deliver up their arms, to a man, and will take the oath of allegiance! This might be called the ‘Peace of Women,’ don’t you think so? They have carried the thing through. If it hadn’t been for you, young lady, those Macabebes would be down here right now. You belong to work like this. The Island of Nahal ought to canonize you!”

Julie had never been so acutely stirred. After all, a part of the Great Adventure was coming true!

The natives of Nahal entered into a state of inordinate rejoicing. On the evening before the memorable Thursday they gave a ball of towering magnificence. It was true that at the ending of the war almost every one was bankrupt, but nothing so spectacular had ever happened in Nahal. It would be in the Manila papers—it would be in the papers of America that the redoubtable Nahalites, of their own free and enlightened will, had come to peace.

Julie went to the ball with Calmiden, notwithstanding the fact that Purcell, in a formal note, had claimed the privilege of escorting her. Julie had been cruelly bewildered and apprehensive of the consequences of her refusal, because the Treasurer was now the actual head of civil affairs.

It was indeed a magnificent ball, but the Americans felt considerable discomfiture upon finding their hosts still wearing arms, when they had come unarmed.

And a breach occurred between Julie and Calmiden, because Julie accepted the Insurgent General’s invitation to dance. From Calmiden’s point of view the request was the next thing to an insult; but since this was the culmination of the coup d’État which she herself had instigated, the fear of jeopardizing it in the slightest degree had her caught fast. Not until the next day were the insurgents to give up their arms, and in case Andegas became incensed, a little thing like a dance might overthrow the whole course of destiny. It was perfectly possible for Andegas to stick a knife in her back, as a signal for a general slaughter. Moreover there was something in the perilous uncertainty of the moment that exhilarated her. She had bent her soul upon a great adventure, and she thrilled to the dim things it foreshadowed—things that swam before her stirred vision like the pageant of the worlds in the night sky which she glimpsed through the galleries.

When they left the ball, the Americans departing en masse for mutual protection, Calmiden gave very clear expression to his displeasure.

“I can’t understand you—the things you do. What came over you to consent to dance with that half-breed? Imagine their getting up a ball and coming bristling to the teeth with weapons, just to tease us! That ought to be enough for you forever! What makes you act as if you belonged to this hideous game?”

“I do,” Julie under the fever of the night recklessly replied. “I understood this particular thing, and I was going to see it through!”

“Even against my wishes? To dance with Malay cut-throats—you a star!”

“I would have danced with the devil under the same conditions.”

“Julie, talk sense. However am I to understand you? Chasing chimeras that will bring you nowhere—whereas you and I are all that count. Give up these terrible notions. You don’t know what you are about—what, my God, all this may lead you to!”

They parted at Julie’s door with a feeling of estrangement, like the prick of pain.

The next day Calmiden left for Solano, to secure some supplies for the garrison. He went on a boat which had come into Nahal harbor the night before, bringing mail.

At school, Julie, who had not yet received her mail, learned that salary checks had arrived for both James and Miss Hope. At noon she hurried home, fluttering with anticipation and relief. The thirty dollars was nearly all gone. At the thought of Purcell, she shivered.

With trembling fingers she opened her letters. One was from Mrs. Calixter. She thrust it aside to hunt further for the check; but her money had, inconceivably, not come. The disaster of the wrecked boat had been rectified for everybody but her; all the others now had their checks. What sinister design was back of this? Soon her desperate situation would become known, and against such publicity her pride forcibly rebelled.

She was facing a critical state of affairs. Although certain varieties of food were cheap in the village, her resources would soon be unequal to purchasing even these. She had been doing her own cooking—very badly indeed; and suffering from it, as well as from a too rigid economy of diet.

Moreover the school, which was the center of her life, was subtly, as under an evil enchantment, disintegrating. Every day disclosed more and more empty benches, the youthful occupants of which, in Julie’s dreams, were to have been shining pillars of the future. The girl’s efforts to locate the cause of the disaffection came up against a dead wall. The secret psychology of the East confronted her. In vain, after facing those deserted benches that struck like a blow at the very roots of her spirit, had she appealed to the parents. The women were silently sympathetic, the men were non-committal; but none reached out a hand to her.

She guessed only too well whose power alone was great enough to deflect the boys from their upward course. The souls of their parents were throttled by their leader, at whose heels they would have gone to the devil.

The priest had learned who had instigated peace—Maria Tectos having hung in the terrible limbo of excommunication till full confession had been forthcoming. His spiritual subjects had begun to show the disquieting effects of revolutionary new thought, and he hastened to stretch out inexorable arms over his dominion. A spiritual czar, whose whole power in life lay in his compelling hold on the souls of men, he did not intend that any of his chattels should escape their bonds. He had an overweening sense of possession, but little real interest in his creatures. Above everything conceivable, he hated the Americans. Since he had laid his special curse upon Julie’s establishment and had not interfered with Miss Hope’s school, it was perfectly clear upon whom his ill-will was concentrated. With the vital structure of her work shaking about her, she was in the worst possible straits.

Her money, or rather Purcell’s, had come to an end. She was facing starvation. There was no one whom she could bring herself to approach for help. She summoned her last forces of resistance. Calmiden must certainly be back within a few days, and the money from Manila could not diabolically hold away much longer.

She picked up Mrs. Calixter’s letter. It was full of explanations of divers sorts, and threw light in multiple directions—belated light.

She and her husband had been to India on an extended official visit with the Governor-General. She had meant to write sooner to Julie, but on a trip like that, Julie would understand, a great many things had been wiped out of mind.

“Barry McChord, whom you remember, I know, and who still holds himself as your friend, told me on my return of his fruitless efforts to find out what had become of you—and a very strange mix-up it was. I was gone—and your Department gave your location as Solano. But when Barry wrote there he received the answer, after an unconscionable time, that there was no such person on duty there. The Department, upon being again questioned, hazarded the theory that you might have died or gone home—although it admitted that of such events it should have a record. At any rate you were given up for lost. What chaos inconceivable! And that red-headed schemer—who I suspect was to blame for all this—is still away on a long rest in Japan! I believe that wretch has been deliberately miscarrying you on his lists so that upon investigation he could point to his magnanimity in assigning you to the superior station of Solano. If you would, brave little Julie, insist upon going to the dangers of Nahal, he may have argued, whatever happened to you should not be set down to his account. If you wandered off any place else, it was not his fault. But how you have received your salary I can’t think unless he has made it his own concern.”

And was that why, Julie wondered, she was left in these straits; and would be—until the red-headed man came back?

She read on:

“A little army woman whose husband is on leave here from your very spot cleared up the mystery. She told Barry how much alive you were—ending revolutions, and transforming the Malay race; and being proposed to by the entire bachelor officer personnel of the battalion—one of whom you were most certainly going to accept.

“Barry told me he could understand how you had forgotten your earlier friends. I believe he is going to China, and perhaps he will not come back. Each time he goes, he says he may not come back.”

Julie put the letter down weakly. Ah, she was not at all successful, as Mrs. Smith had said. Her school was almost gone—and to-day she had had scarcely anything to eat.

When it was quite dark, she took a walk, staring into the palely lit jungle as she passed. Overhead one brilliant constellation blazed. It seemed to hang over a distant city far to the north, beyond these troubled southern seas. She put out her arms to its light.