But if there were nights in a moonlight garden, there were also broiling days in an equatorial city with streets hot under foot and an atmosphere like waves of fire. Julie was moving dizzily and heavily through life, sleeping badly, dreaming strangely, and forgetting her food. She sat abstractedly over her meals, staring out beyond her.

“That is the way with you Americans!” SeÑor Reredo remarked. “You burn yourselves out at once, forgetting that it must be a slow wick and a long one that lasts in the hot winds.”

“You are ill!” the SeÑora would declare. “All the fine little bones in your face are beginning to show.”

It was just as well, the girl thought, that the taste for food had left her, since the fare of the Reredos was almost completely unpalatable. Julie supplemented it at great expense in an American restaurant. They sometimes served her carabao’s milk, and besides, during the meals, it was the habit of Chiquito, the pig, to whimper around the table for titbits, sticking his fore-paws beseechingly on the children’s laps. Chiquito was a clean pig and a very clever one, but Julie had her prejudices.

She was forced to walk great distances through the hot streets. Livery carromatas were too dear, and she would not get into nondescript Tondo vehicles. Once in desperation she had resolved to attempt one of these conveyances that carried the undercurrent of the city’s life. The rat-like remnant of a horse, whose eyes begged for death, had stopped its unsteady motion, and the coachman, the veriest dust of the streets, was signaling the occupancy of the crazy coach, when a dreadful unconcerned face with small-pox ulcers all over it, and a cigar stuck in the corner of its mouth, thrust itself out at her. Death abroad on a jaunt!

The streets with their unfathomable misery of life were an eternal curiosity to her. It was incomprehensible that men would take the trouble to go on breathing on such terms. Poor, tawdry, human procession, with its occasional holiday of soul, when, like ants from far trails, its units met and rubbed noses unintelligibly. It was good not to be a gopher or an ant, but to be something that counted very acutely in the universe. Gophers were born gophers, ants were born ants—and Julies, by a comfortable decree, were born Julies. It had all been arranged that way definitely and succinctly by thoughtful forces and there was no use of aching over it. Gophers and ants must go on nibbling around the careless feet of the gods. One single human fleck of pity could not fan the East into life. It was all too big a proposition for one ineffectual soul.

One day walking home by a new route, she saw in the aperture of a broken wall, a forlorn old man sitting, looking out with half blind eyes. Poor old hermit, pondering perhaps with all the hopelessness of the East, on To-morrow. She stopped to speak a few words to him, and saw stretching beyond her an alley of broken turns, between lines of battered old walls. Moved to curiosity, she followed the alley and came suddenly upon a savage fastness, at the edge of the sea, a hideous retreat of tattered beggars, who at the sight of the chance invader came leaping up out of the sand, where they had been ferociously gambling and matching cocks, and closed about her—a jeering, threatening crew, followed by a pack of horrible dogs. Out of their filthy huts made of scraps of tin, boards, old rags, nipa, more tatterdemalion creatures appeared. The dregs of the city cornered here! On the shallows of the sea, lay a flotilla of blood-red sails. What, horribly, did they catch in this nightmare retreat?

Never had she seen human existence in quite so grotesque and satirical a setting. This was not a picture of the usual native, contentedly at sea in the universe, nor of the gophers in their sad mud embankments, nor yet the settled evil of Chinatown, but of a crooked, grimacing sort of corner where the indigestibles of an Eastern city found haven. Human grotesqueries! The ordinary panorama of the native’s futile life was disheartening enough, but this blur of savage hobgoblins jeering at the sun, seizing like Macbeth’s witches on the prey of the Alley was terrifying. She ran precipitately back, tearing her garments from the women’s greedy clutches, with the howls of the Alley in her ears and their blood-red sails burning on her brain. The horror of the East! The Pavilion of unreclaimed human waste for which not even God cared!

Stumbling blindly home in the sun with an aching head, she felt that this hot cosmos into which her life had fallen was a furnace that was going to consume her altogether. But the medicine, she remembered, would help this miasma and dull the sick weight of the world. She climbed upstairs, picked up a box and took a powdery pellet from it.

On the table lay a long, official envelope. She picked it up abstractedly and broke it open, wondering why the red-haired man was moved to send out so many meaningless, uninspired messages. She glanced it over, then suddenly for an instant not a thing stirred in her. At last her breath broke out of her throat in a sob. Another blow out of the East!

The Department was very brief about what it had to say. It gave no specific reason, nor did it go deeply into explanations. It merely announced that after the end of the current month her services would no longer be required. It took not more than a line to intimate that the failure of her efforts in the Southern Islands was responsible for this decision. If she desired transportation to the States—the Department was beautifully benevolent about this—it would arrange it at an expense to her of one hundred and twenty-five dollars gold.

All such savings as she had made had gone at once to Mrs. Morris. She had no money, so what did transportation to the States or to the moon mean to her? When she had embarked for these Islands she had assumed the complete responsibility of herself. But to be pushed out without a hearing at court—or a cent to depend upon! The red-haired man had bided his time. Miss Hope who was now in Manila had furnished him with the weapons of retaliation for that scene in his office long ago.

The East was trying hard to cast her out—and she had asked only to struggle along and fumble for the end of the rainbow. But never, never, could one be secure here. In the East, one was like a nation trembling always on the verge of war, quivering before a catastrophe that would surely fall. But she would not leave it—till things had happened. She would not be driven out before her time. She was not beaten yet. She was not beaten yet. She would not beg, nor starve, nor explain. If Nahal had done nothing else, it had stiffened her pride. The SeÑor had several times spoken of how useful she would be in his office in the morning to attend to the English aspects of his practice. She could have employment from him for the whole day.

If they had not spoken of Nahal, if they had not employed that particularly fatal word failure concerning the work of her heart, she might have risen to give them battle. But the Department had touched vitally and cruelly the quick of her soul’s pride. Nahal—the single sacred endeavor she had to her account in the New World—had betrayed her finally and openly. Barry, the colossus, stood with his feet on two soils; Shell held in his grasp a savage empire; and Chad, and multitudes of others, struggled to shape the new existence; but she, stripped of her pretensions was blowing like a scarecrow to the winds of the East. Not for worlds would she have had Chad know that his intuitions concerning her, his resentment of her in his universe, had been justified. Nobody should ever know this final humiliation—that she had been weighed in the scales and found wanting.

With that paper on the table her connection with the Builders in the East had snapped like a cobweb to a star. The Great Experiment had thrust her out. Henceforth hers was a separate lot, a mere grubbing for existence. Julie laid her head down on the table and wept inspired youth’s disillusioned tears. The fragrance of the golden jessamine floated up across the seas from that far, relinquished kingdom of the soul. A poor, desolate and bewildered spirit mourned outside the gates of its shining memories.

“My island!” The girl wept after its vanishing outline.

But Julie knew that, though she might bid Nahal farewell forever, it would still remain an abiding obstacle of soul—a dark enigma lying heavily across her life.

The SeÑor was completely satisfied with the new arrangement whereby she gave her whole time to his service. He was the only person with whom she was wholly candid concerning her break with the Educational Department.

Barry, she found hard to satisfy with explanations on this score. She confessed to him that for a long time she had owed a large debt which had ridden her back like a nightmare, that expenses were too high to save anything on her salary and that the SeÑor’s emolument was in excess of anything that she could expect elsewhere. He looked at her hard but said nothing. His silence troubled Julie at night. She knew that he was disturbed that she should have abandoned even her small part of the Cause, which in these days was in urgent need of the whole strength of its adherents.

His own business affairs she knew were disintegrating. People said he had been losing money for some time. But he stuck to what now commenced to appear as a losing cause. Julie thought miserably of the time when he would cease to appear in the character of a prince of the East. He was grappling now with tremendous forces at home and abroad. The agitation for independence for the Islands surmounted for the moment every other national concern. The natives awaited almost hourly its promulgation.

“We’re six thousand miles away—in the other half of the globe, and they can’t visualize our problems. They don’t understand that they must hold this thing off far a while. The whole course of history will be changed. Oh, if they could have one ‘look see’ into the Pavilion, Julie! or one glimpse at the holy foundations of the new Asia! I tell you I can’t bear to see this project cut adrift in the universe alone. Ah, well, I’ll be going to China soon, and I promise you I’ll raise every foot of its ancient dust.”

Julie adored Barry in his spurts of white wrath, but he was wretched now as well as angry.

“Cleopatra’s barge will not stay afloat. It will sink with its Eurasian captains in Eastern seas!” Julie prophesied.

He glanced up quickly. “Isabel!” he muttered. “She must be in a fine frame of mind. Perhaps the grandiose title we gave her may yet come true. Republics over here will be sadly unsteady things. A strong hand can too easily twist them into the one-man power the East understands. It’s the effect on China I fear the most. She was drawing life and encouragement from this experiment, and just at the crucial moment the whole thing with its far reaching results, is about to topple into dust!

“The day is near,” he told her, “when we must pick tip our packs and move on.”

Julie tried to realize it, tried to plan toward such an eventuality, but a spiritual as well as a physical inertia enveloped her like a super-added sheath of being. She exerted herself to the utmost to hide this new condition from his observation for she knew in what a desperate struggle he was engaged for the life of the New East. More than any personal emotion that could ever seize him, she believed, this passion gripped his heart. And for one who had achieved nothing in this issue, who had actually been flung out of all its purposes, no legitimate appeal remained. Her dazed being still responded acutely to all his problems—but the greatest of them all had left an agony in her soul.

Once he looked at her very troubled. “What’s the matter, Julie?” he begged.

And Julie seeing that in that moment he had forgotten everything but her, grew frightened in spite of her exultation.

“Oh, it’s just the effects of the sunstroke!” she exclaimed, drawing herself defensively up.

“I’ll take you to see Braithwaite,” he said. But he was summoned away on another of his critical errands, and the visit to Dr. Braithwaite did not take place.

Nevertheless Julie was stirred to concern by the abnormal agitations within herself. She scrutinized herself in the glass one day, and was startled by what she saw. The delicate outlines of her face, which looked like sculptured crystal, reflected a disturbing inner ravage. Under her lower lip a singular bluish shadow, which for some time had been dimly suggested, had become definitely marked, as if some menacing malady were revealing its first sign.

She was puzzled and a little alarmed. She resolved to go and see a doctor, only to remember that in her present unstable state she dared not risk the complication of the cost. She consoled herself with the thought that if she were really ill more malevolent symptoms than these would have declared themselves.

Her mind skirted lightly an under-current speculation concerning the medicine she had been taking. Because it had become so indispensable, she did not actually attempt closely to question it. It was unquestionably, peculiarly and irregularly derived; but it certainly was not poison, as her use of it had proved. And it did work; it took pain away;—whatever abnormal after-agitations it might produce—and just now that was what overwhelmingly counted. Back of that fact she was not disposed to go. Rosalie had been perfectly right when she said that a large part of the valuable drugs of the world were to be found wild here. Julie herself had walked through pungent jungles and forests and felt that she was traversing some universal pharmacopoeia. The natives of Nahal through the use of herbs, which were the only medicinal aids at their disposal, had learned how to exist quite without doctors. Julie had a consciousness that clung to any sort of panacea. She manifested always an inability to stand upon her own spiritual powers. This particular panacea, she was however aware, had caught upon some vital fiber. On blistering days when the heat hung in the air like a stifling blanket and all the forces of her being refused to go on, the old crone’s nostrum dropped a soothing veil over her blinded, quivering senses and freed her awhile from her intolerable burden.

It helped also in another struggle, the struggle to keep from understanding, as the days passed in the SeÑor’s office, why her services were so valuable to a pupil who paid so high a price to make no progress at all. Subconsciously she had sensed for a long time at what this artistically indirect method aimed. As the SeÑor’s vocabulary of gallantry began to come out more clearly from behind its Spanish ambush, the girl sometimes felt as if she were hanging by a hair over a precipice. She cursed devoutly her knowledge of French; for though she pretended not to understand, the translation would too often come out on her burning face. She dared not be angry; she could not revolt: were not her last bridges cut behind her? Between her and the most desperate extremity, this situation alone interposed. This slow, creeping Spaniard was the rope on which she must balance across the cataract. So when opulent emerald rings and rare rubies were discovered lying casually upon her desk—for her to admire—and were waved back silently upon her when she tried aghast, to return them to their owner, she could only employ the foolish subtlety of remarking how much SeÑora Sansillo would appreciate these intended gifts of her thoughtful husband.

It was a silly strategy, executed by a crude man in the crudest way. There was no spirit in it; the lovely stones stood for nothing but an ignorant man’s misapprehension of the human soul. It would have been laughable to the girl had she been in other than a desperate plight. Nor could she laugh at anything that caused her so to despise herself, her own ignoble clinging to such a rope of life.

But she would not retreat from her individual stand. Barry alas, had troubles enough now. And this place, which had monstrously and unjustly, and without a hearing, cast her out, should receive no appeals from her. One must make a final stand on one’s own in this shattering world—and not if she were to die to-morrow would she come out and declare her failure. She was still desperately, so she conceived, the mistress of her own fate.

Then at the climax of these over-head emotions, would come an engulfing ennui, as if all this stir were but an eternal pouring of water through a sieve. To keep alive in this fearful foreign whirlpool, one had to struggle every instant. Something seemed to be thrusting her gradually toward the edge of a dark and fatal pool, and there was creeping over her an appalling weariness of life.

One day she received word that Isabel wished to see her. She had not seen Isabel for some time. After having been discarded from the real life of this colony and forced to her present anomalous mode of livelihood, she shrank from encounter with the brilliantly successful ones whose rival she had once essayed to be. As the outcast from the Great Project that Chad had predicted she would become, her despair at seeing those who had entered the race when she had, became sometimes more than she could combat. The wretched queerness of her being lately had made her morbidly acute.

Isabel most of all had seemed to press this superior fortune pitilessly upon her, had even, so the girl thought, demonstrated a hint of hatred on their meetings. This thought troubled Julie; but she could not bring herself to ignore the summons, for not only had Isabel’s friendship more than once been turned to account, but Isabel sending for her in this unexplained way, showed that she had something vital to say. Out of this infinite restlessness Julie wondered, as she set out for the house of the caliphs, what was to develop.

Everything appeared unchanged. The old keeper, with the withered face like a Chinese nut, who had told her the first time she had seen the place that this was the dwelling of a “daughter of the country,” came forth from his lodge and ushered Julie into Isabel’s domain. Absolute stillness pervaded the house. The dwarf, who had watched her acutely as he conducted her up the stairs, disappeared. The pensiveness and inertia of the tropical afternoon had fallen like a sad mood over the exotic world. Julie looked about her and sighed. She felt a desire to get out of this ageless Asian splendor down into the sun of the street. To-day the teak wood called up visions of distant sweating bodies. The shining dark floors stretched like black waters beneath the feet; the heavy golden curtains stirred as under Indian magic; and the ivory Buddhas dozed in a changeless Nirvana. Perfume hung in the air: the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of ivory palaces, mixed with the odors of dying flowers. Back in the next room, in a corner where she could just glimpse it, was the gilt shrine of the Green God, who from time immemorial had inspired in the hearts of men the fear of fate.

Abruptly at an invisible warning, Julie’s eyes swerved sharply. A sinister brown face gleaming like an evil star from a chaotic mass of black hair appeared half concealed among the potted palms. Julie rose almost defensively.

“Isabel!” she exclaimed, with a tremulous voice. She did not wish this changeling, who could assume at will the soul of either of two races, to see how disturbed she was.

The Malay woman bore down upon her in stormy silence.

“I haven’t seen you for a long time,” Julie said, agitatedly casting about her for a means to meet this mood. “I lead a hard, busy life.” She spoke of the difficulty of her existence as if the fact of it might somehow appease Isabel, who drew nearer and fixed upon Julie a gloomy concentration.

There was something almost thirst-like in this examination. Isabel appeared to be straining for something that lay beyond the girl’s own consciousness. The sun had given Julie a glow of color, and when she essayed to smile the old miracle of look transfigured her like a sudden star lighting brightly the weariness of earth. Isabel waved a demolishing hand before it.

“Futile, futile flame! I knew it would burn itself out. You want me to believe,” she went on fiercely, “that you are in a deep struggle—that you are giving your soul to be ground up for some fine cause. But you can’t deceive me. I know that you are a malingerer—and that, whoever’s bones may be broken by the wheels, they will assuredly not be yours. In the vigil, the peril, the anguish of this fool’s dream, you have had no part. You have sat and waited—like an imbecile sphinx—for something to come along and solve your foolish riddle. The very stars have sung in your ears, and you have not heard. Nothing has touched you—nothing can!”

In sullen challenge, she swept on. “Why were you not content with your little hillcock, and your wretch of a man-ant? Why have you to stretch out your foolish disastrous hands to pull a world to pieces? You know,” she rushed on, fiercely, “that our friend Barry along with the rest of them—stands on the brink of complete catastrophe; that the great structure he believed he had created is about to fall about his head; you know too what the love of these things is to him—yet you thrust yourself between him and a single saving chance; you who could blow away out of the world like a feather, without consequence to any one! It is always exasperatingly weak things like you who plant their feet in the course of fate. I have sent for you to tell you that you had better take yourself out of the way.”

Julie stared with a beating heart at this being to whom she was as a kindling to a flame.

“I don’t know what you mean by my being in the way,” she stammered weakly. Isabel stood somberly glaring at her. What was in this woman’s mind? What was it all about? Her eyes turned to escape this dark distorted vision, and ran along the wall’s stream with an armory of poisoned weapons, each of which was forged to deal death in a particularly monstrous way.

Her mind struggling with its fears caught at the vague intimation of hope for Barry in Isabel’s wild utterances. “Oh, do you mean that he could be saved—out of the wreck? You could do it, Isabel, of course. Oh, don’t,” she pleaded desperately, “let him be driven out!”

“Do you think you have to plead with me, you little wastrel? The East will requite those who truly give themselves to it. There will be a place in it for Barry—but there will never be any place for you—that is what I want you to understand. When the hour comes to requite him, I warn you not to intervene.”

Julie’s spirit asserted itself. “What is going to happen to him?” she demanded.

Isabel flung at her a contemptuous glance, and exclaimed in a sudden abandon of revelation: “The finest thing that ever happened to a white man in the East.”

The girl’s head sank. Upon her memory had flashed the new portentous words exchanged in Barry’s house between Isabel and the white Rajah of Ramook. Her whole being felt suddenly borne down. Her lips slowly paled; the light swept out of her face, leaving it a chill, ghastly white.

Isabel strained forward, her eyes riveted on the blue blur which stood out now under the girl’s lips. “Ah!—” she said, and sank back, while Julie moved unsteadily to the stairs.

She went through the down-dropping dusk of the garden, in utter hopelessness of mood. The choice of the starry ways cut off forever.