“Somebody!” the young man ejaculated in forcible disappointment.
“A very beautiful woman in Manila, who had a tiny temple with a Green God in it—a pitiless little Green God—presented it to me as a gift from him. I met such strange vivid people up there. They called the woman who gave me the bracelet the Empress of the East. There were others—too,” she paused, struck silent by a recollection. “How I should have loved,” she continued, “to stay there! Evidently it was meant that I should miss wonderful adventures. I can only be a glow-worm on Nahal.”
“There is something about you that suggests that you are to travel far. Oh, I hope not, Miss Dreschell. Don’t go any farther. Nahal might become something remarkable.”
As he said good night, and held her hand in his, Julie’s thoughts took a sudden unintelligible turn, as if they were never again to follow the old course.
CHAPTER VII
While Julie was dealing, in a splendid glow, with the affairs of the universe, her own mundane concerns, she was uneasily aware, were urgently in need of attention. She retired one night to her room, with the jungle closing up about it, and the jungle’s wild creatures rustling but a few feet away, to do some deep worldly thinking. From her trunk she took the book in which she fitfully kept accounts, and calculated furiously for some time, going over the inexorable figures.
Suddenly she dropped the pencil, and sank back in her chair, staring somberly into the night. Its blackness swept up to the grated bars of the windows, and peered in at the solitary, harassed figure in the cell.
Not one dollar of the hundreds she owed Mrs. Morris had been paid back. That very first, sacred responsibility her new life had assumed! In Manila, money had unconsciously spent itself. Then, there had been the expenses of the trip South. But bitterest fact of all, the splendid wardrobe, the cause of all this trouble, had bit by bit, impalpably and detestably, as if under an evil incantation, been giving way. Dresses cracked explosively, at the touch, and silk stockings, however prayerfully drawn on, disintegrated into an elemental snarl of thread. What the elements did not demolish, the cockroaches, nearly as big as mice and scrambling deftly all over the room, voraciously devoured.
Julie sat and burned with dishonor over her affairs. She felt as abased as if she had become the actual chattel of her far-away creditor. She would have resorted to any expediency to keep this bondage from being made public. The Dreschells had an unconscionable pride. Mr. Dreschell had brought up his family on the theory that borrowing money was only a shade less reprehensible than stealing it. This obligation was the Debt of England to Julie’s soul. With her small salary, how, she pondered, was it to be worked out?