“It calls. I shall go.”
Turning her back to the broad stairs that led down and away to the cool, damp, outer air, she took three steps downward on a narrow circular staircase which led, who could tell where?
Smoke rose from the spaces below, the smoke of many incense burners.
Pausing there, she seemed about to turn back. But again came the deep, melodious, all but human call of the gong. Moving like one in a trance, she took three more steps downward and was lost from sight.
* * * * * * * *
The person who had disturbed Florence’s hoped-for hour of solitude on the island beach was a girl. Yet, as Florence first saw her, she seemed less a living person than a statue. Tanned by the sun to a shade that matched the giant rock on which she stood, clad only in a scant bathing suit that in color matched her skin, standing rigid, motionless, she seemed a thing hewn of stone to stand there forever.
Yet, even as Florence looked on entranced, she flung her arms high, gave vent to a scream that sent gulls scurrying from rocky roosts, and then, leaping high, disappeared beneath the dull surface of the water.
That scream, together with the deft arching of her superb body as she dove, marked her as one after Florence’s own kind. Gone was her wish for solitude. One desire possessed her now: to know this animated statue of the island.
“Where does she live?” she asked herself. “How can she dare to visit this desolate spot alone?”
Even as she asked this question, the girl emerged from the water, shook back her tangled hair, drew a rough blue overall over her dripping bathing suit, and then, leaping away like a wild deer, cleared the breakwater at a bound and in a twinkling lost herself on a narrow path that wound through the jungle of low willows and cottonwoods.