“The Star of Troy?” There was a flash almost of sudden dismay in his bright eyes.
“It’s not certain,” she admitted wistfully.
“Wife-of-the-Kami, he will not come today.”
She turned her eyes, so full of sorrow and of disillusion, upon him. “Why do you say that, Tsuda?”
“We must—gn—wait out the year. It is always so. He will not come today, Wife-of-the-Kami.”
Her eyes travelled away from his face dully and rested on the sea again—the sunny, vacant sea. She felt that her heart was very close to breaking.
When at last her arms tingled with the strain of holding up the binoculars, she lowered them slowly. And then she saw that the young savage, Nipek-kem, had slipped noiselessly toward them and had prostrated himself before her.
“Please tell him he may get up,” she said.
Then Tsuda, who, she saw, had likewise dropped to his own slightly rheumatic knees, spoke a few low words to Nipek-kem, who promptly arose and sat on the ground Turk-fashion, beginning at once an elaborate Ainu gesture salutation. Every movement of his body lured a tiny jingle from the accoutrements of his royal-looking shirt-front. Finally he lifted up his hands as high as his head, the palms turned upward, and lowered them gradually to his knees, speaking at the same time a few murmuring words in the crude Ainu dialect.