One morning, soon after dawn came in across the dreamy jungle, Stella stood before the calendar blocking out her yesterday. There was a look of quivering, almost frantic hope in her eyes. Today was the long awaited fifteenth of August, and she meant to spend it all in her rocky nook, gazing to sea through the glasses. Perhaps there would be a tiny speck at last on the horizon. Captain Utterbourne was a man quite capable of being perversely and poetically punctual if he chose.
Mechanically she loaded her pistol and took the binoculars. Who but the Captain would ever think of anything so beautifully and maddeningly ironical for a wedding gift?
On the way out she noticed in passing that her husband wasn’t in the parlour where he usually slept now, so as to be near his smoking materials.
On the floor in a corner, half buried beneath trash, lay the big book in which King’s report on the progress of opium culture was to have appeared. Life seemed slipping out between his fingers. He could not have told just when he crossed over the sinister boundary beyond which there could be no returning. However, he had passed it by, and now could only press on and on.
This morning the sun was barely in the sky, yet King was not in the house. Dully she wondered where he was. Then she passed on out into the early freshness of the dawn.
At first the sea was misty. But as the day advanced a little, and the shroud gradually dissolved, it became very blue—like the colour in certain canvases of primitive Italian painters.
Tsuda came toward her, hat in hand, and his demeanour, as always, scrupulously humble. Sometimes she felt Tsuda was too humble; yet she believed he had the heart of a child. Tsuda could scarcely be thought of as in any sense a kindred soul; they were not of the same race; and at times he alarmed her, vaguely, with his flashes of oriental mysticism; still, after a fashion, he spoke her tongue, and beside him and her husband there were only the hairy Ainu....
Tsuda greeted her cheerfully and with his usual wide-eyed innocence in full operation.
“Wife-of-the-Kami, you come early today.”
“Yes,” she told him quietly. “I am looking for the Star of Troy.”