"He will be back——" She broke off the sentence and raised her eyes to his, and though she was gazing full at him, she did not seem to see him. She seemed looking at something a hundred miles away, and the sensation of being gazed through as though he were clear as glass, and absolutely negligible, gave Floyd a queer sensation—almost a shiver.
"In a while," said he. "What ails you, Isbel—what have I done to you that has altered you so? We used to be good friends. It was not my fault, that trouble with one of your people; he had killed a man. He had committed murder, and the man who commits murder must die."
Isbel listened to him just as though she were listening to the sound of the sea or the wind, with the same far-away look, the same air of abstraction. Then she said, speaking not in answer to him, but as though she were making a statement about some ordinary matter:
"I have no peace here. I wish to go to my own people. Schumer will come back, but he will not find me."
"Hello!" said Floyd. "What do you mean?"
But she would say nothing more; she would not even look him again in the face, and, irritated at last, he turned away and sat down to breakfast.
If Schumer were to come back and not find her, where on earth did she propose to go? What did she mean? For a moment the horrid idea occurred to him that she might intend suicide; then he dismissed it; Isbel was not the sort of person to commit self-murder without any appreciable cause; though mysterious enough, she was too healthy and sane for that folly. All the same, as he breakfasted, her words kept ringing in his head:
"Schumer will come back, but he will not find me."
"God knows," thought he, "it will be hard enough here all alone without her bolting off or doing something foolish—anyhow, there is nowhere for her to bolt to, unless she bolts into the lagoon—confound Schumer and his methods. If he had left that chap alone, she would not have taken this dead set against us."
When he had finished breakfast, he went to the pierhead at the break on the reef and swept the sea line with his eyes. Away, far away, like a flake of white spar, a sail showed against the sky. It was the Southern Cross, almost hull down on the horizon.