A day came when Julie knew what it was to go without food. She reasoned, in the midst of a bad headache, that she was not the first person to whom this had happened, and that to go a few days without eating was not absolutely menacing to one’s existence.

The next day she unearthed a wrinkled camote, and Delphine presented her with a couple of chicos. Her giddy brain collapsed, however, over the boys’ arithmetic, which suddenly had become as incomprehensible to her as Euclid. On the third morning, she was wholly incapacitated, and before the school hour, dropped down on a couch, where she dozed off from sheer weakness.

At ten o’clock she heard as from a great distance the whistle of the boat. Calmiden had come! She dragged herself up and made an effort to dress, but she, strangely, felt no interest in a world that seemed to have receded immeasurably out of her actual experience. From tense struggle in its atmosphere, she had floated off into sleepy planets where dreams were real. She tumbled back on the couch and went to sleep.

When she came back once more to mundane affairs, it was about three o’clock. Everything was still and lonely. Calmiden had not yet appeared. He was always busy, though, for hours with the unloading of the boat. Perhaps he had expected her to come down to the wharf to greet him, and she had been too dazed to think of it. She dressed with closed eyes.

A knock on the door startled her senses into activity. She ran her fingers hurriedly through her deranged hair and opened the door. Not Calmiden, but Dwight confronted her, looking greatly perturbed.

“I want to talk to you—just a bit—” he hesitated, “if you don’t mind.”

Julie led him in.

He dropped down on the bare edge of the chair that she motioned to, and stared at her aghast. “Lord!” he exclaimed, “you look like a ghost! Have you been ill?”

Julie shook her head. “What have you to tell me?”

He was clearly at a difficulty to reply. Finally he blurted out:

“Why didn’t you come to me, Julie, and let me help you—I’d have been only too proud to do so—instead of playing into the hands of that blackguard?”

Julie paled. “Purcell!” she murmured in dismay.

“Then you know?”

Again she shook her head dumbly.

Dwight pursed his lips in a solemn whistle. “Gad! Some folks would say it was none of my business, but I can’t stand by and see you facing the thing so pluckily and not lend a hand.”

“What did Mr. Purcell do?” Julie demanded heavily.

“He’s been taking his meals at the bachelors’ mess lately—while he had no cook. To-day at the lunch table he brought up your name, and he meant to do it to death. But he was clever about it. He didn’t want any one to stop him before he’d let out his powder. He began by saying that you were engaged to Adams. You bet that made a stir—your being engaged all the while you were letting the rest of us give you a rush! Purcell said that he had seen Adams here in this town with you, that he had made that fatal ride to see you, and that he himself had seen you kiss Jack Adams good-by. Moreover, he declared, that when the anxiety about Adams was at its height you informed the Major that Adams had been in Guindulman and confessed your relation to him. That was a stagger for us—all right, Julie, you’ll admit. He said that the Major himself had told him all this.

“Now several of us had liked you, Julie, ever so much—and we got rather excited at your way of playing the game. Purcell went on to say that you had had an affair with him, and with Terry, who had also kissed you—along with Adams and others. Seems he got the information about Terry from Miss Hope. He also said you owed money to everybody, and that the firms in Solano had written continuously to him about it. But when the creature, quite gone with hatred and jealousy, said that you had borrowed money from him, and that anybody could have you for a sweet-heart, I kicked him out.”

Dwight had not dared to look at her during this recital. Her head was bent down over her two clenched hands which lay in her lap.

“Kenneth was not there!” she murmured, illimitable satisfaction in her quivering voice.

“But he was there!” Dwight cried—only to regret the next moment that he had spoken.

Julie had shot up out of her chair and was gazing at him with wide eyes of horror. As she stood there staring out of her ghastly pale face, and not speaking, a sense of fear for her rose in Dwight.

“I tell you, Julie, I’ll stand by you through everything!” he vowed.

She clutched hard at the back of the chair for support. Her limbs were weak; her soul was shaken to its uttermost depths, but she must still make a stand against this falling world.

“I did borrow money,” she said in a voice so faint it seemed to trail after her thought like a thin curl of smoke, “not from Purcell, but from the Treasury, as I supposed. I was in the direst need. None of us had received our salaries for months. I hung out as long as I could, for I was afraid of him. But I was simply driven to him at last. What a horrible net he has built around me! Terry—himself—Adams, Ah! Yes, I did kiss Adams good-by!”

“Were there any witnesses present when he gave you the money?”

Julie shook her head.

“You poor, unsophisticated infant! Don’t you know that it would have been a criminal offense for him to use government funds for his own purposes? You stepped right into his trap. He was waiting for you, the rascal, and knew perfectly well that you wouldn’t know what you were doing.”

“No, clearly, I have not at any time known what I was about!” She crumpled, stunned, into a chair.

Dwight rushed to her. “My God! Is it possible that you’ve been starving yourself with all of us right around to help!”

“I guess I have—but it wasn’t anything compared to this. And who are all of you, who were ready to help—as you say?” the girl cried out in anguished bitterness. “Didn’t you all stand by and listen while that man told his vile lies? You see now why I have no more pupils in the school, why everything’s gone to smash, and I’m hopelessly ruined, as he meant I should be?”

“Be just to us, Julie! We were shocked at your light treatment of Adams.”

“Ah, I was never engaged to Jack Adams. That was a desperate, stupid lie of mine, which I hoped would help him out of the scrape. As for the other men that I thought to be my friends—Oh! this terrible land—where we’re all strangers to one another after all!”

“But this story must be put down. It’s all over the town. You can do that best yourself!”

“The story of my own infamy—I must put down!” She laughed hysterically. “You see, Dwightie, it’s so fun-ny—when I came offering all I had!”

When the young man had left the house, Julie slipped suddenly and insensibly to the floor.

It was dusk when she thoroughly came to herself. Her brain was clearer, and into it faintly crept the hope that Calmiden might emerge successfully out of the catastrophe. Betrayal on his part—however odious Purcell had sought to represent her—was inconceivable.

Dwight had dispatched a boy with a mountain of viands, which she barely touched. She was not hungry. This was no time for eating, when all the issues of her life were at stake. With a heart that stopped beating at every foot-fall upon the road outside, she sat unmoving among the shadows. Every minute must bring him to her need. This day could not end in this monstrous state of affairs.

But as dusk deepened into night and no sign of Calmiden appeared, a bitter frenzy of anger stirred up in the wretched girl’s heart. What kind of a man after all was he who could stand by, without offering a protest, while her enemies calumniated her? Here in her humbled pride and disgrace, she was crouched waiting for a man who had so clearly repudiated her that he did not even deign to proffer an explanation of his conduct. From the affairs of this notorious nobody—her promiscuous love affairs, and wholesale debts, he had contemptuously withdrawn himself. Calmiden, she knew, had the conventional notions about the impeccability of a woman’s name. It was her whole duty, as he expressed it, to keep it “unsullied.” He made sharp, very sharp distinctions in his standards for the sexes. All women were shooed into one corner of the universe, from which he dared them on the direst penalties to emerge, while the men gamboled in the rest of its wide areas in a fashion which he tolerantly chose to ignore. And all the while he sincerely believed himself the broadest minded man on earth. He had frequently crushed Julie in their arguments with his towering Victorian morality. Julie had attributed what she considered his charmingly archaic habit of mind to the fact that he had derived his education at West Point, a sort of Military Monastery where women were barred.

“Pooh!” Calmiden had replied to this, “girls come up there in shoals!”

“But you see them only on Dress Parade! What do you know about them in their own environment, in the real phases of life that stretch back of the Dress Parade?”

“It was nice to have them come!”

“Ah! I think that that is just a little of what is the matter with you, Kenneth. You began your life with woman coming to you!”

Julie admitted, as she sat waiting for him, that she had committed some intolerable foolishness. It was perfectly true that in order to afford herself the thrill of conquest and satisfy at the same time an errant poetic opulence in her nature, she had inconsiderately, joyously and, as she had believed, inconsequentially, permitted most of the men to make love to her. And that not singly but simultaneously—and now she had been found out. Slowly began to awaken in her mind the significance of every human act in the infinite chain of cause and effect. Every one of these men had been humanly piqued and curious. That, perhaps, accounted for their listening to Purcell. Concerning Jack Adams, Julie felt her one justifying thrill. Her comrade at arms!

Perhaps she should have confessed this incident to Calmiden, she thought, but she had never been able to bring herself to speak of that adventure, now that Adams was “out of it.” It seemed something sealed forever between him and her.

Another hour passed and the girl’s black resentments and outraged pride rose into fresh tumult. The pride of the Dreschells was their dominant trait. The world might hold Calmiden’s position in life better than hers, he might tower in immeasurable contempt over the sordid disaster of her life, yet she had one bomb left to deliver. She would drive him out of her life. He had forced his way into it. The world might go hang! Purcell could make it believe what he would. But upon one person the outrage to her dignity and pride should be indelibly branded, so that never till the end of his life would he be able to forget.

His moment had come and passed—in the dark, terrible hours, when frightened and half starved, she sat waiting for him to come and set things right. Her brain had traveled the whole blistered course of thought for extenuation, and now, roused to a fury of injury, she determined to hurt Calmiden in the last way possible—to cast him off finally and completely. That he had already accomplished this repudiation beyond anything that lay in her power goaded her to madness.

In a suffocation of emotions she wrote the letter. It was not what she said in the letter but the way she found to say it, the white heat of the words, that must later have seared a path through his brain.

“My vulgar debts repulsed you! The insinuations of that man were preËminently revolting to your sense of pride. Not to speak! It was an easy way out! There is another kind of Judas, it seems! You sat and sold me away by your silence. You have done what I did not dream it was possible for any living being to do. For such a betrayal there can be no explanation ever. None is humanly possible.”

She summoned Pablo Cherico from the other side of the house, and told him to get Delphine, who lived not far away. The little boy, roused out of his bed, came running. One person in this disheveled world was always eager to serve her. She handed the letter to Delphine.

“Take it at once to Teniente Calmiden, at the Mess. Put it in his hands!”

She stumbled back into the house, given over to the demons of darkness and despair.

When Julie awoke next morning, she found a bundle of mail tied with a string, lying on her doorstep. There were two official letters. Now when disaster was quite complete and irretrievable, her money had come—all the arrears of it. A week ago and her life would have traveled into safe places. Now there was nothing left but the bleak privilege of paying her debts.

Delphine, with the captive Balthazar grubbing along in the dust, appeared. “I gave the letter into the hands of the Teniente, last night, as you told me to do. He was already in bed. The house is very ugly. No flowers on the table, no lace in the windows, like in the beautiful residence of Mrs. Smeeth—nodding but banjoes.”

“What did he say?” Julie cut in on him.

“Nodding at all. Maestra! He take the letter and read it, while I wait. Then he turn away.”

She turned heavily back into the house.

Ignoring school—she had now been absent two consecutive days from that depleted institution—she grimly resolved to attend to her own concerns. Miss Hope, of course, would not fail to take note of this defection, but Julie, bitter over the careless methods of the Department which had helped to bring about this dÉbÂcle, was reckless of consequences.

First of all there was Purcell! She meant to tackle him single-handed. Indeed there was no one that she could think of from whom she could have derived support in this situation. If she had been a man she might have knocked him down and settled the issue at once. She wanted, she thought, to do something inexpressibly violent to him.

She was brushing out her hair before putting it up to go out, when a shadow loomed in the doorway. There stood Nemecia Victoria swaying like a purple passion flower.

Usually Nemecia was clothed in silken variations of the spectrum, with cob-web laces across her bosom. To-day with a winding-cloth bound round the body, her beautiful bronze limbs bared, she looked like a statue.

Nemecia crossed the room. She took the silvery coif of Julie’s hair in her hands and caressed it. “My poor SeÑorita, with hair like this, to live so meanly—at the mercy of men!”

An acute curiosity shot through Julie. This was the Nemecia who knew the secret hearts of men. Just whose secrets? A temptation came to her to get Nemecia to speak. But no, she would not lift that curtain.

“You wouldn’t live as I live?” Julie queried.

“My mother did; she worked always,” Nemecia brooded. “Her body grew to be all bones. Then she was stolen by the Moros—to be a slave, till she died. When the pirates came I hid in a hole in the ground. They took my brother too.”

Her voice commenced to choke. She broke off harshly. “SeÑorita, have you heard the evil that man says of you?”

She lifted up her arms, beautiful soft arms, hardening as they rose with a fury of passion that for the moment seemed to eclipse the great golden calm of the morning world.

“Men I have known many, but that white one is a devil! I ha-a-te him, and since I am afraid Hell will not get him—I shall kill him!”

To Julie’s dumbfounded amazement she drew from her bosom a long, thin, cruel strip of a blade and held it in her clenched fist before her contorted face.

Julie knew these people too well to be panic-stricken.

“Put it away, Nemecia!” she ordered. “They would put you in the calaboose and keep you there till you died, an old, old woman.”

Nemecia’s great eyes flashed fire. “Are you then cool over the things he said of you all over the village? Will you allow him to insult you to the world, you who brought about peace for Nahal? He seeks to ruin you, as he sought to torture me. Let me go for us both,” she whispered tensely, “to-night, to the hammock in the gallery—and when he sleeps—give two quick blows, one for you and the other for me!”

“Alas, Nemecia, the calaboose is dark and cold. In your little cell of stone by yourself forever, you would never see the sun. You love the sun, Nemecia. You love the praise of your pretty face. No one would ever listen to the music of your ear hoops again. Just stillness and dark, forever, as if you had died and hung by your hair in space!

“Come!” she seized Nemecia’s arm, and the knife went clattering to the floor. Julie’s eyes shone with pleading. “Do this for me, Nemecia! Let him go! Ah! What a wonderful revenge! To hold the option of one’s enemy’s life in one’s hand—and to toss it back to him. Give me that power, Nemecia! Give me that strength!”

Nemecia sulkily picked up the knife. Then she stood erect facing Julie. “My people owe you a debt which they have forgotten. Take then as my share of it, this creature’s life, for,”—in a fresh flare—“I meant surely to kill him this very night!”

She turned indifferently out of the door.

Julie waited till she was out of sight. “I can go to him now!” she cried to herself. She started forth for the Palacio. Fortunately it was an hour when there would be many people in the building.

There were two Filipino clerks in the office with Purcell. Julie advanced, with head uplifted, to the desk where he sat. He looked at her an instant and in the flash of his expression, Julie saw how thoroughly he knew he had done his work.

“I’ve come to pay you back your money!” She handed him several checks. “You will please cash these. And you will give me a receipt.”

The note of calm authority in her tone clearly puzzled him. He busied himself in a slight confusion with the safe.

The transaction finished, Julie’s spirits rose. There were dangerous lights playing in her green eyes. “You have said some unspeakable things about me, things that you knew to be utterly false! You are a liar, of course, and you believe me incapable of defending myself. In this country too, where as you know,” she looked at him steadily, “one can so cheaply buy one’s revenge.”

Purcell paled. She saw he had understood.

“I did not expect my remarks to be repeated broadcast. You did borrow money from me—and as you must be well aware, the right sort of women do not resort to such expedients.”

The girl looked hard at him and at the thought he read in her mind, a painful dark red dyed his face.

“Who is to blame for all this?” he exclaimed in a hoarse voice. “If you had taken me, I would have stuck to you through thick and thin. I wouldn’t have cast you off like your friend Calmiden. He never intended to marry you. You must know that. Didn’t I warn you long ago?”

“And you saw to it that your evil prophecies came true. You have hurt me in every way possible.”

She turned and started to go.

Suddenly she felt that he had pressed up behind her. “If you’ll still say it isn’t too late—I’ll—”

Julie wrenched herself out of his detaining grasp. “You’ll— What will you do?” she cried, turning savagely on him. “Having deliberately ruined the whole compass of my life and brought to pass the worst that was humanly possible, you still dare to think you have power over my life? Listen to me! I have power over your life—at any moment. I held it on the tip of my finger this morning, and balanced it there—and if you lift your hand against me again—” She stopped in a wild sob and ran from the room.

When she got to school, she found five boys huddled together awaiting her, generaled thither by the faithful Delphine, who had gathered them up outlaw fashion from the streets, and who was now oratorically instructing them from the platform. Delphine announced to her that the present gathering was the very best he could do, for—though he had lain in wait for the former scholars from dawn—they contrived to get down to the river, and from its inaccessible depths had defied him, their heads bobbing along the surface like grimacing corks.

James, too, was furious and had been twice to see the Padre, who had retreated to the sanctity of his lofty and impregnable convento to avoid the emissary of education.

“I’m going to climb the bell tower and beat him,” James declared in heat, “if he doesn’t call off this boycott.”

Purcell’s rumors, monstrously exaggerated and embroidered upon, had swept through the village. Public opinion had pronounced judgment in these empty rooms. In desperation, Julie went to the Major. He had heard the reports, and as he had a particular sensibility for Julie, who had been the means of cutting the Gordian Knot of his military career, he offered to give Purcell a piece of his mind. It was an extremely delicate thing for him to undertake; for, since Purcell was actually the chief civil functionary on the island, it was the Major’s duty to remain on good terms with him.

Julie found in these trying moments that she had misjudged this man who towered in his rigid rectitude of character over the life of the colony. He was stern military metal, but every atom of that metal rang true.

He assured Julie that the Americans understood the unfortunate affair. The Filipino conception of it apparently did not trouble his mind. The Padre to his deep regret was outside his jurisdiction.

The women of the colony defended Julie, as women if left to themselves generally will defend their kind. One day when Julie was passing Mrs. Smith’s house, the little lady called out to her to come in. After the girl had sunk dispiritedly into a cane chair, Mrs. Smith broke out: “Julie, you’re taking this wretched business too much to heart! Do you for one instant think that we who know you would believe a thing against you? Marlborough was at the Mess that day when all that trouble rose and heard what passed—something about your having been engaged to Adams, and your letting all the men kiss you. How many”—turning into a tone of playful curiosity—“did, really? How fearfully interesting, you little philanderer! I—there were a number in my history too. Just heaps of ’em, in fact. Why shouldn’t there be, when we’re making the Sentimental Journey of youth? These stupid men! They think they are the only ones who can take the trip!

“What made Calmiden mad, of course, was your being engaged to Adams, his class-mate, all the time you let him make love to you. That was playing the game rather roughly, I admit!”

Julie explained wearily the embroilment about Adams. “He came down here because he was lonely—and to see me, because, well, maybe I was a sort of romantic ideal to him—who will ever know? We had made a contract to help each other through—quite different, you understand, from the other kind of contract.”

“Does Calmiden know about this?”

Julie listlessly shook her head.

“But perhaps that’s just what’s the trouble! What would you have done if you thought he were untrue? He has, moreover, a peculiar character, as you know.”

“Untrue? He is completely so!”

“What on earth has Calmiden done?”

“What has he done?” Julie cried trembling. “Didn’t your husband tell you the horrible things Purcell said against me—my character, my integrity, shamelessly pulled apart before the whole mess?”

“Purcell did not make any serious attack upon your character while my husband was present. He spoke, as I have said, of your engagement to Adams, and of the fact that he had seen Adams kiss you—and some others, I believe. What he said afterwards, Marlborough did not hear, for, not finding the conversation to his taste, he got up and left, and so did Calmiden!”

“Kenneth?” Julie cried wildly.

“Yes, he left the room, Marlborough said, white with rage. He was furious at your double play.”

“But Dwight said that Kenneth was there—and took no part.”

“Who was following anybody’s movements after such a disclosure? Don’t you see, nobody had dreamed that Adams had come to Guindulman! And when you know Dwightie as well as I do, you’ll discover that he never sees anything clearly, poor dear, when he gets excited. Marlborough says that when Purcell announced that the Major had told him that you were engaged to Jack Adams and that that was why he set out on his disastrous adventure, everything was in excitement, and Calmiden rose straight off and left. Perhaps he should have said something when Purcell spoke of your universal flirting—he made a mistake there, but he was shocked and angry.

“There, I’ve handed you back a new lease of life, I see. Go immediately and make your peace with Kenneth. Good-by!”

Julie never knew how she got across the parade ground; it seemed as if on wings. The blood was spinning in her head. Once home she sat down and composed a letter, of a kind that never in all her life was she able to write again. It was written under the spur of renewed belief in the universe. Until this wrong was righted the universe could not properly balance, and not an instant must be lost in setting it right.

In this letter, Julie endeavored to make Calmiden understand that there was nothing she would not do to show how fearfully sorry she was.

She made a full and free explanation concerning Adams. Very urgently she tried to initiate Calmiden into the delicately intangible bond that had existed between them. She explained that the disastrous first letter had been written in one of her fatally uncontrollable impulses, prompted by circumstances which at the time had distorted her view. She would reveal those conditions when he came to her, which she begged him to do at once.

Nothing could have been more consummately abject than this letter. Julia again dispatched Delphine to Calmiden, with the strictest injunctions for a swift return with the answer.

At last the swift soft pad of Delphine’s feet in the dust of the road! Then in another moment, breathing hard, for he had sensed the super-importance of the errand and had flown through the streets, the lad laid the envelope in her hand. Her name was inscribed on it in Calmiden’s handwriting.

Julie tore it open. Short, like a telegram, it burned through her brain. “I can not come, now. Sometime you will hear from me.”

That was all. A masterpiece of the enigmatic, meaning anything or nothing at all. Julie sat down and studied it out for a shred of hope or help it might contain; but at last, with tears of loneliness and despair in her throat, she gave it up. Calmiden did not mean to come back. Of that she was now convinced. She had injured him, and he had told her over and over with unmistakable directness that he did not forgive. From him this answer was inevitable. There was no appeal from it. Not even her letter had weighed in the issue.

Time went mercilessly on. The term was drawing towards its end. There were now only two pupils left in her once ardently conceived shrine of uplift. One of these was of course Delphine—the other an undersized youth who found it completely impossible to escape him.

She wondered how she had managed to be so happy once; or so independent in her aims. Those aims had now become almost obscured. One can’t go on greatly believing when the edifices one has sought to raise to the gods are smitten by lightning. Julie’s once fervid spirit was becoming becalmed. She couldn’t understand anything at all—a dark veil seemed to be stretched before her eyes. She longed, and yet dreaded to get off the stage of this drama.

The bachelors had moved their establishment down the hill, to the very house that Julie upon her introduction to Nahal had occupied. The Plaza had become too congested, and the Reyes had rented their house to the Military Government. Julie did not see Calmiden; he contrived absolutely to keep out of her way.

Finally they passed each other one day on the street. Julie turned white, and a spasm crossed Calmiden’s grim, gray face. As their eyes met, her blood congealed. For out of this brooding face nothing of the old Kenneth looked. One hard passion had conquered that face and turned it to stone. Right there the truth that she had paradoxically refused to receive stared her in the eyes.

He did not speak, and neither did she. A ghastly encounter—the meeting of their dead selves! Frightened and hopeless, Julie hurried on when she saw that Calmiden was to make no sign. He had closed definitely his strange soul.

Julie’s reason was beginning to point out inexorably that Calmiden was a great deal more to blame than she had thought. The questionableness of his permitting Purcell to say in his presence anything whatever about her—however shattering to his personal romance, or of his allowing his anger and outraged pride to get the better of him before he had demanded an explanation of her, had not at all balanced, in his mind, the fact that in her blistering letter she had told him that he was the worst possible conception of a cad. She knew that Calmiden had sought out the Treasurer, and that they had fought brutally in Purcell’s quarters; but even there he had accorded her enemy, however violently, the chance for a vindication that he would not give her. Also she knew that, although he had fought her accuser, belatedly, he still believed secretly a great deal of what that accuser had had to say.

He had caused her to suffer a great deal. He had brutally broken her pride, and had done it wilfully, hoping to make her contemptible to herself. It came over her in a great moment of proud anger and relief that she had never actually cared for him. He had succeeded in swerving her out of her path, he had quenched her torch, and helped to place her in the failure where she now found herself. Her soul, for a long time to come, would scorch with the hurts he and Nahal had inflicted.

In the bitter days that followed, the girl felt hideously lonely and abandoned. A sense of disgrace scorched her isolation. People believed wicked, abominable things of her, and there was no way to change their minds. The friend upon whose loyalty she had most depended had under the severest conditions deserted. She cried a great deal at night, till one day a letter came that brought a rebound.

For a minute or two it seemed hard to believe the reality of this message. It read:

“Would he indeed come back!” Julie recalled what Mrs. Calixter had said: “Each time he goes he says he may not.”

There was another letter from Manila—from Isabel Armistead:

The time came for Julie to put in her application for transportation to Solano, where she would catch a boat for Manila. Calmiden being Quartermaster, her application passed through his hands, and came back to her signed by him. She stared grimly at his signature.

That same afternoon she met Mrs. Smith on a corner. “Have you heard the news?” that lady exclaimed. “The Treasurer has been dismissed, and is ordered to turn over his office and leave at once. Julie,” she asked whimsically, “where is your pull?”

Julie shrugged her shoulders negatively.

“You can’t think? How about that man in Manila who was so glad to hear about you again? Couldn’t he do almost anything?”

Julie’s eyes opened. She had written to Mrs. Calixter and recounted her troubles. Could that have been what Barry meant?

On that last day when she stood in the school which had once been the temple of her faith, one solitary boy faced her, struggling with his tears—the loyal Delphine.

“Maestra, take me with you!” he chokingly pleaded, clinging to her skirts in appeal. The girl and the little brown boy clung to each other weeping.

After leaving the school, she went to a spot outside the village and gathered some flowers. She had made few farewells, but there was one person to whom she must bid a positive good-by. It was a shining morning. On just such a one had she embarked upon the renaissance of Nahal.

The cemetery, as she entered it, was very still. Nobody ever appeared to visit it, yet Adams’s grave had a fresh look that startled Julie. It was as if he had not completely given up his hold on life; as if he were vaguely in part still present. Somewhere down there she might reach the heart of a friend—a friend who had passed through the limits of human tragedy.

It was the kiss he had given her that had really put her disaster in motion; but it rose at this moment before her as the cementing seal of a friendship of high deeds.

For a long time Julie sat over the grave, insensible to everything but this sad communion. The sun, merciless creator, flung upon the world the compulsion of his quickening rays, ruthlessly enforcing the fiat of life. All the burning force of existence seemed to be beating down upon her bared head like an intolerable weight; but she heeded it not. To be human, and to be the plaything of unassailable forces; to aspire, and to be defeated; to reach up like Prometheus for the fire of Heaven, only to be dashed to pieces on the ground! In a paroxysm, Julie flung her head down upon the grave. There was nothing in the universe to answer anything!

When she lifted herself up a queer numbness had attacked her limbs. Forked lightning seemed to be piercing her brain. Holding to her head, as if there were a rift in it, she staggered out of the cemetery. She was in the acutest pain. But beneath it, conquering each convulsion was the indomitable resolve to leave Nahal. To-day she should go out of this island forever!

From the wharf a row boat was to take her to the steamer out in the bay. The vessel was to leave at two o’clock, the siesta hour. The Major, with Mike scuffling along behind on a chain like an imp, escorted her to the wharf. Almost blinded she got down the hill.

The Major seemed to be much moved, and unable to find words that would put his feeling into expression. “It will be a long time hence perhaps before you will reap any reward for what you’ve done,” he said. “I myself am under an undying obligation to you, and while my appreciation is not much—” he stopped, and studied her face. “Go home, my child,” he urged. “Don’t let the East crucify you!”

Julie shook the hand of the fine old soldier, and walked down the wharf. There, a brand new camisa on his back, and the smallest conceivable bundle in his hand, was Delphine.

“I go with you,” he announced in a transport of determination. “My oncle—he give me away, with the new shirt.”

Even Balthazar was not missing! With his halter around his neck, he was hanging investigatorily over the wharf by what appeared to be the nub of his tail.

Delphine thrust into Julie’s hand a crumpled sheet of paper written over in very bad Spanish, and signed unmistakably by Pedro Bebong. In this document he ceded over the body and soul of one Delphine.

The children of the East—bartered, sold, drowned by guardians who were unable to cope with existence! Julie’s heart had often ached over the valuelessness of their poor little lives. It was for all these poor crushed creatures that she had come overseas to offer her life.

But she was having much too desperate a time making her own way through this new world to become responsible for another creature. Besides, she had had one wormwood lesson in adoption. She gently shook her head.

The boy began to cry wildly, in an abandonment of despair. The tears ran down the quaint little corsair face. The poor little starched camisa, which had stuck out stiffly like armor in which to encounter the world, fell limp under the rain. Even the little bare feet had their appeal. They were willing to trudge the world over to find a future.

The Fiscal came down to the wharf on business. Delphine appealed his case to him, crying and clinging to his coat. The Fiscal said that the note transferring Delphine was perfectly genuine and authentic; that the boy’s aunt and uncle found great difficulty in feeding their own brood, and that if the boy did not go with the Maestra, he would be apprenticed to a Chinaman who kept a tin-shop.

Into that den of filth and idolatry would go everything that Julie had planted in the best of her boys. Did Delphine, frantically pleading, dancing about in his grotesque little camisa, and weeping terribly all over his droll face, dream anywhere in him of saving any of those things?

Julie stood silent. Balthazar, emerging from under the side of the wharf, scrambled towards her, and gave angry pecks at her shoe.

“The boy is dissatisfied with Nahal,” the Fiscal said. “Now that the yeast is in him, he wishes to rise. I was that way once; but a man, as you know, Maestra, cannot push through a wall. Take him, if you can. Do not leave his soul to die.”

Julie gazed at the boy clutching now at her skirts. As she gazed down into his face, the revelation came to her. Down there before her, electing to follow her wherever she went, the new generation knelt. Whatever the past and the East stood for, the new generation had cast the ballot for her and the light. Defeat was turned into victory—a victory that would grow and become universal. In the face pleading up at her, she saw the curtain of darkness rent.

“Come, Delphine!” she said.

From the deck she watched the island recede, beautiful and paradisiac as it had first looked. The scent of its golden flowers drifted out upon the water. Quiet, green, and sun-touched, the island drifted off like a dream.