Calmiden stopped short with a forcible exclamation. “Why, she will never let us see each other! I say, you are not going to let that happen? Do you want to give up life completely, sit up alone night after night in the dusk among the palms in this desolate bit of jungle? You don’t know what it is, I tell you—this dark alien land. Every atom of it makes you feel your abandonment. This country’s not for women anyway. It’s for armed marching men. I can’t think how you dropped into it. How did you?”
Julie started. “I think—somebody said something to me once on a roof top.”
“Well, I am talking to you now from the ground floor. Life is short enough anyway, and you propose to cut off all its possibilities by burying yourself in the wilderness even more effectually than you have done already. Why it’s insulting the high gods who made you the lovely being you are. Maria Tectos—and all the natives be dashed when they try to dictate your mode of living!”
Julie stood looking soberly down into the dust of the sun-burnt road. The life of a hermit on the island of Nahal! Could one even for the most inexorable principles endure it?
“It’s beginning to get awfully hard!” She sighed. “Sometimes I long so to go back to Manila—I really had no idea of being so completely put out of the world. I thought I should work very hard, and win my certificate to title among the Builders. There appeared to be very little real work left for me in Manila—and it didn’t seem fair to play safe over courses already won. But I really didn’t expect to be so cut adrift.”
She straightened up, and smiled.
CHAPTER VIII
Calmiden pressed closer. “We couldn’t walk in the dusk, ever any more, Julie, among the mango trees, with the fire-flies all about us, or sit on the wharf and watch the little boats.”
Julie’s gaze dropped again in heavy thought. Calmiden was looking at her closely.