Nothing could keep him from coming back and yet the heart of Katafa failed her before that speechless sky and that deserted sea whose meeting lips had closed like the lips of silence upon her lover. Her happiness, so great, perhaps too great, had been cut apart from her for the moment; it stood aside from her never to join her again till Taori came back from what the gods might be doing to him beyond that deserted sea, beneath that speechless sky.
The waters that from all those desert distances drew the voice of indifference and fate that she heard at her feet in the thunder of the breakers, the sky, robbed of speech, yet filled with the ever-lasting complaint of the questing gull.
Someone drew near her. It was Kanoa.
Katafa, who was a friend of all the world, was a friend to Kanoa. She had watched him as he sat apart from the others, noticed his melancholy and spoken to him, asking the reason.
“I am thinking of my home at Vana Vana,” had lied Kanoa, “of the tall trees and the village and the reef, of my young days and my people.” His young days! He who was still a boy!
“But you will return,” said Katafa.
“I do not wish to return,” said Kanoa, “I am as one lost at sea, who has become a ghost, and whose foot may no more be set in a canoe and whose hand may no more hold the paddle.” Then Katafa knew that he was in love, but with whom she could not tell, nor had she time to watch and find out, being busy.
As he drew near her now, she turned to him, and for a moment almost forgot Dick in her anger.
“Kanoa,” said she, “where have you been in hiding? They have gone without you; they called for you and you did not come, and they could not wait. You were wanted to help them in the raising of the sails and the work with the ropes—where have you been in hiding?”
“I have been fishing,” said Kanoa.