CHAPTER XV
NAN
“Jim!” cried Dick. “Hai amonai—Jim—where you gone to?”
He was standing before the house in the early sunlight; he had just come out and Kearney was nowhere to be seen. A breeze had broken the heat, and the absolute loveliness of the morning found reflection in the soul of the boy.
The far-off sea that would be purple at noon lay like smashed sapphires beyond the reef. The lagoon, whipped by the breeze, showed colours unimaginable by man, colours that seemed to live by their own intrinsic brilliancy, stretching from the luminous blue of the near pools to the purples and mauves of the submerged rotten coral beyond which lay the dancing sapphire that washed the reef line.
Over all, the breeze, the flower-blue sky and the gulls.
But Kearney was nowhere to be seen.
Then, as Dick called again, the girl came out from the trees at the opposite side of the sward, fresh from a dip in the lagoon beyond the cape, and with a scarlet flower in her hair, which was tied back with a bit of thread liana.
She crossed the sward, and the boy, seeing her, bothered himself no longer about Kearney, and set to preparing for breakfast. Had he not been so busy he might have noticed a difference in her. She walked assuredly and with a carelessness and an ease that were new to her. In ordinary times she would come for her food as an animal might come, an animal not quite tamed, and vaguely distrustful, take her seat at a little distance, and wait meekly, yet watchfully, for the dispensations of Providence. It was different now. She came close up to Dick and, without offering in the least to help, stood watching him, taking her seat when the meal was ready as close as “Kea’ney” had sat, and helping herself to the food without waiting to be helped.
Even Dick, satisfying his voracious appetite, noticed the change in her now. He did not know what it was in the least and he didn’t bother to think, yet in some curious way it disturbed him.