“How can you be so interested in them?”
“This is my destiny,” she said.
“Your destiny!” He looked soberly at her.
There with the tropical sunlight beating down upon them, they seemed suddenly to face their deeper selves.
CHAPTER XI
Julie had received a note from Calmiden. “We will cross the causeway to-night,” it said.
She waved back the toiling future generations of light, and took the note to the window. What did it mean? The few lines managed to convey a message quite beyond their import. She read them over and over, then gazed across the white winding road and the green banana trees, to the causeway lying like a high thoroughfare between two worlds. Was to-day to be the last of an old existence, which she was to shed like a discarded garment? Would the footsteps that had followed strange paths in the East turn about completely, and the dream that had burned in her soul be left forever unfulfilled?
The breeze swayed the sacred tree of India beneath the window, and its golden incense full of mystic and exhilarating intimations showered upon the air. Julie was carried on the wave of its magic to a roof garden in Manila and the hero who had first overwhelmed the horizon of her youth. Often, looking out on this glowing landscape, she had seen this image, but more and more as something lost in the swift passage of life.
She, would not see him any more. Fate, that fate which ruled this world had arranged it so. Her destiny lay along the beaten paths of the world. She was too small an atom, as Calmiden had said, to survive the great chances of the coming upheaval, or to dare ever, ever to achieve a force like Barry McChord’s. His spirit had lighted areas of her life tremendously. Nobody ever had so stirred or quickened the pulse of her soul. But that spirit was receding before the hard facts of existence that Nahal had brought. It was getting too terribly hard, with so much pressing upon her, to inhabit two spheres. And if anybody in the North had given her a thought again, he had not taken the trouble to make it known. She had dropped completely out of those great activities, and not a reverberation of her life or its yearnings had reached the far-off goal of her city of dreams. She herself shrinking to her real, insignificant dimensions.