He must get busy on that mast and sail—he had neglected them for days—and, full of the fury of the newly released idea, he came bursting out of the wood across the sward, making for the house and shack where the sail was stowed. He would be able to sail the dinghy out beyond the reef and hunt for bigger things. Unhappy Dick, he did not know of the bigger thing that was feeling for him to grip him, of the hunting awaiting him on that day.
Full of this idea, heedless of earth, sea, sky or Katafa, he came running across the sward. The girl saw him coming and half rose, sitting on her heels, a lovely picture in the tree shadows; a picture that might have driven an artist to despair or drawn an anchorite from his cell; a picture only to be matched by that of Dick as he ran, sunny-haired and light of foot and swift as the wind.
One might have fancied him running towards her and have pictured the embrace of these two most lovely of God’s creatures, but he passed her as though she were a tree stump, vanished behind the house, and reappeared in a minute dragging after him the ugly old mat sail. Casting it on the ground, he made for the dinghy, seized the mast which he had left lying in it, and came back with it on his shoulder, still running.
That was just like him. He would leave a thing undone for days, maybe for weeks, and then, of a sudden, start on it, forgetful of everything else.
There was some old rope and signal halyard line that Kearney had salved from the wreck. This had to be fetched, also some tools from the tool box; he fetched them himself and then, sitting down, happy and content, he set to work and found his work cut out for him.
The sail was too big, it and the spar that carried it. With the sail and spar spread out on the ground, he crawled about it on his hands and knees, measuring it as against the mast.
Sometimes he would say a few words to the girl, heedless whether she replied or not. Then, when he had been working some half hour or so, looking up, he caught her eyes.
He was sitting with the sail spread on his knees and she was lying opposite to him, resting on her arm. She had looked in his face a thousand times before, straight as the sun looked at him or the lagoon, but now, just before her eyes could evade him, he caught their glance, caught the look on her face—something that vanished and became nothing before his mind could fully seize it.
Pausing in his work, he looked at her for a moment without speaking. She seemed to have forgotten his presence; her eyes, cast down under their long lashes, were following some pattern her finger was tracing on the ground, and her face showed no expression.
He went on with his business mechanically. His mind, so far from straying, focused on the work in his hands. Every fibre of the mat that differed in colour from the others impressed itself on his sight and understanding. The stitches went in evenly spaced, as though made by some unerring mechanism; Katafa might seemingly have been a thousand miles away, and yet every fibre of the sail, every stitch he put in, seemed part of the something strange that had suddenly come to him from Katafa.