He ran to the place where he had laid her beneath the trees; there was still faintly visible the slight depression made by her body, and close by, strangely and clearly cut, the imprint of a little foot.
Nothing else.
He stood and called and called, and no answer came but the wood echo and the sound of the morning wind, then he ran to the sea edge. Then he knew.
The sand was trodden up, and on the sand, clear cut and fresh, lay the mark left by a beached canoe and the marks by the feet of the men who had beached her and floated her again.
They had come—perhaps her own people—come, maybe, yesterday whilst he was hiding from his fears debating with his tabu—come, and found her, and taken her away.
He lunged into the lagoon and swimming like an otter and helped by the outgoing tide, reached the reef. Scrambling on to the rough coral, bleeding from cuts but feeling nothing of his wounds, he stood with wrinkled eyes facing the sea blaze and with the land breeze blowing past him out beyond the thundering foam of the reef to the blue and heaving sea.
Away from the north, like a brown wing tip, showed the sail of a canoe. He watched it. Tossed by the lilt of the swell it seemed beckoning to him. Now it vanished in the sea dazzle, now reappeared, dwindling to a point, to vanish at last like a dream of the sea, gone, never to be recaptured.
“And Maru?” I asked of Lygon, “did he ever——”
“Never,” said Lygon “The islands of the sea are many. Wait.” He struck a gong that stood close to his chair, struck it three times, and the sounds passing into the night mixed with the voices of the canoe men returning from fishing on the reef.
Then a servant came on to the verandah, an old, old man, half bent like a withered tree.