“Ah yes!” she said once. “Poor Tuo! I shall miss him—and such a death, too! But oh, he saved you and your friend! And then, he was but an animal—but the others!”
At her express desire they promised not to speak to any one else about it.
“I will tell you why—or you will know why—later,” she added. “But you can speak privately to Monella about it; to no one else just now!”
When they found an opportunity of speaking to him about it, he looked very grave.
“You have had a narrow escape,” he said. “Heaven be thanked you did escape. I cannot explain more to you now, but may be able to do so shortly. Meantime, please do as the princess says, and keep this matter to yourselves.”
All this time Leonard’s relations with Ulama had remained unchanged; they had not been placed on any settled footing. Monella had asked him to take time to make up his mind, and had intimated that nothing would be said or done meanwhile. Leonard had, however, been too impatient to put his fate to the test to be able to wait after the encouragement Monella had given to him. But, whether Ulama had spoken on the subject with her father, he knew not; for it so happened that he had not seen her alone since their love-scene in the boat.
And now she was evidently much discomposed about their adventure with the ‘devil-tree’; though she did not refer to it again.
Naturally too, the recollection of it was very much in the minds of the two young men. Leonard asked Templemore, one day, what the branches of the one he had seen were like.
“They were covered with small excrescences,” he replied, “that are suckers and piercers in one. They pierce the flesh and then suck the blood. The whole affair is a sort of gigantic vegetable ‘octopus,’ or devil-fish, only that it has a hundred or more ‘arms’ or branches instead of eight, as the octopus has. I have heard of devil-fish having been caught as large as eighty feet in length, on the coast of Newfoundland. But I never knew that its vegetable prototype grew to anything like the size.”
“Of course I have seen devil-fish,” said Leonard thoughtfully; “but they have a mouth—a great beak—to which their arms carry the food. Do you think it is the same here? You saw that the branches carried the poor puma up into a hollow in the top of the trunk. Do you suppose the thing has a kind of mouth there?”