Katafa was in the boat, ready to push off, but instead of joining her he beckoned her on shore again and saying, “Come,” led the way off towards the trees. She followed him through the woods and up to the hill-top. There, on the southernmost side of the great rock, he stood and pointed south across the morning sea. She gazed and saw nothing.
“I see nothing, Taori, but the water and the wind on the water and the sea birds on the wind. Ah! There!”
Her eyes had caught the stain.
Out on the fishing bank, long ago, she had seen the full blaze of the lagoon striking upwards to the sky, making a vague, pale window in the blue; this was the same, though remote.
“Karolin,” said Dick.
She stood, the wind lifting her hair, and her eyes fixed on the stain, which grew and spread in her imagination till the song of the reef came round her, and the freedom of the infinite spaces of sea and sky. All she longed for lay there, and all she loved stood beside her. She said nothing. Never once in her talk of her old home had she expressed the wish to go back. The place where she had found Dick was antagonistic to her, yet it was the place where she had found him, and was in some way part of him, and she could not put her dislike of it in speech, nor her desire to leave it. Even now she said nothing.
She did not know that the craving for adventure, for movement, for change, and the desire for newness were stirring in Dick’s heart.
He scarcely knew it himself. The thing that had come in his mind was scarcely formed as yet, or, being formed, had not yet developed its wings.
They left the hill-top and came down through the trees, scarcely speaking. One might have thought that they had quarrelled but for the fact that his arm was about her neck.
Before leaving the hill-top, had they turned their eyes to the north, they might have seen across the blue morning sea a vision that seemed cast on the screen of things by the gods in opposition to the far, faint vision of Karolin.