"It's those others—Ayeshi——"
He laughed brokenly.
"What are they to me? What am I to them? Didn't you hear him? That settled it, didn't it? I'm not one of them—I've got English blood in my veins. I've nothing to fear—nothing."
She could not see his face. They were stumbling blindly up the steep and broken path, and the dense growth of jungle walled them in from whatever daylight remained. Yet his voice, the touch of his hand, painted him for her against the black canvas. She could see his face, eyes wide-open and distended, the mouth agape, the sweat on his forehead. She knew him to be possessed by an insidious terror.
"What is there to fear?" she asked in her turn.
He muttered incoherently.
Vahana had vanished. They could hear his body brushing against the tangled growths that hung across the narrow path like warning, invisible hands. Barclay called him by name, but there was no answer—only a sudden stillness. He faltered—the hand which still held Sigrid's relaxed. She stood apart from him. But for the sound of his breathing she could not have known that he was near her. The infinite relief of that moment's freedom kept her motionless, and then she realized that he was moving forward—that he had forgotten her, every ambition, every desire in the one formless, all-mastering dread.
"Vahana!"
Stillness. He groped wildly about him. The sudden consciousness of his isolation drove a scream from his dry lips.
"Vahana!"