“A little army woman whose husband is on leave here from your very spot cleared up the mystery. She told Barry how much alive you were—ending revolutions, and transforming the Malay race; and being proposed to by the entire bachelor officer personnel of the battalion—one of whom you were most certainly going to accept.
“Barry told me he could understand how you had forgotten your earlier friends. I believe he is going to China, and perhaps he will not come back. Each time he goes, he says he may not come back.”
Julie put the letter down weakly. Ah, she was not at all successful, as Mrs. Smith had said. Her school was almost gone—and to-day she had had scarcely anything to eat.
When it was quite dark, she took a walk, staring into the palely lit jungle as she passed. Overhead one brilliant constellation blazed. It seemed to hang over a distant city far to the north, beyond these troubled southern seas. She put out her arms to its light.
CHAPTER XIII
A day came when Julie knew what it was to go without food. She reasoned, in the midst of a bad headache, that she was not the first person to whom this had happened, and that to go a few days without eating was not absolutely menacing to one’s existence.
The next day she unearthed a wrinkled camote, and Delphine presented her with a couple of chicos. Her giddy brain collapsed, however, over the boys’ arithmetic, which suddenly had become as incomprehensible to her as Euclid. On the third morning, she was wholly incapacitated, and before the school hour, dropped down on a couch, where she dozed off from sheer weakness.
At ten o’clock she heard as from a great distance the whistle of the boat. Calmiden had come! She dragged herself up and made an effort to dress, but she, strangely, felt no interest in a world that seemed to have receded immeasurably out of her actual experience. From tense struggle in its atmosphere, she had floated off into sleepy planets where dreams were real. She tumbled back on the couch and went to sleep.
When she came back once more to mundane affairs, it was about three o’clock. Everything was still and lonely. Calmiden had not yet appeared. He was always busy, though, for hours with the unloading of the boat. Perhaps he had expected her to come down to the wharf to greet him, and she had been too dazed to think of it. She dressed with closed eyes.