He made for the southern beach.
Although unused to woods till he reached this island, he had the instinct for direction, a brain compass more mysterious than the trembling starfish that had directed the movements of the wheel on board the Portsoy. Making due south amidst the gloom of the trees, he reached the beach, where the sun was blazing on the sands and the birds flying and calling over the lagoon. The reef lay far out, a continuous line unlike the reefs to the north, continuous but for a single break through which the last of the ebb was flowing out oilily, mirroring a palm tree that stood like the warden of the lagoon. The sound of the surf was low, the wind had died away, and as Maru stood watching and listening, peace came to his distracted soul.
He felt safe here. Even when Talia had been with him the woods had always seemed to him peopled with lurking things, unused as he was to trees in great masses; and now released from them and touched again by the warmth of the sun he felt safe. It seemed to him that the ghost could not come here. The gulls said it to him and the flashing water, and as he lay down on the sands the surf on the reef said it to him. It was too far away for the ghost to come. It seemed to him that he had travelled many thousand miles from a country remote as his extreme youth, losing everything on the way but a weariness greater than time could hold or thought take recognition of.
Then he fell asleep, and he slept whilst the sun went down into the west and the flood swept into the lagoon and the stars broke out above. That tremendous sleep, unstirred by the vaguest dream, lasted till the dawn was full.
Then he sat up, renewed, as though God had remade him in mind and body.
A gull was strutting on the sands by the water’s edge, it’s long shadow strutting after it, and the shadow of the gull flew straight as a javelin into the renewed mind of Maru. Talia was not dead. He had not seen her ghost. She had come to life and had been walking by the sea wringing her hands for him thinking him drowned. For the form he had seen walking on the sands had cast a shadow. He remembered that now. Ghosts do not cast shadows.
And instantly his mind, made reasonable by rest and sleep, revisualized the picture that had terrified his mind distraught by grief. That was a real form—what folly could have made him doubt it! Talia was alive—alive, warm, and waiting for him on the northern beach, and the love for her that fear had veiled rushed in upon him and seized him with a great joy that made him shout aloud as he sprang to his feet, yet with a pain at his heart like the pain of a rankling spear wound as he broke through the trees shouting as he ran. “Talia! Talia! Talia!”
He passed the bushes where he had hidden, and the ferns; he heard the sound of the surf coming to meet him, he saw the veils of the leaves divide and the blare of light and morning splendour on the northern sands and lagoon and sea.
He stood and looked.
Nothing.