"Him sleep now—more better. No sleep las' night. No sleep to-day. Him velly tli-ed."
Emily leaned over at the giant's whisper and caught the measured, easy breathing of a tired sleeper. Yet she heard something else also.
"—home soon—dearheart. Gold girl—wonder——" he murmured, and Emily wondered what manner of woman it was who was waiting across seas for this man's home-coming. It was not thus he would speak of the mother to whom he had set out to return. It could not be such a woman as Shanghai Elsie. The remembrance of what Rowgowskii had said to her in the boat flashed into her mind. She put it away instantly. She resented it. She knew, as only it is given to a woman to know, that it was not to a mate like Elsie that this man would go.
"God bring him safely to her," she prayed in her pity for the woman of whom "The Shadow" dreamed, and she knew not that she prayed for herself.
CHAPTER XIV
Day was breaking as Lavelle awoke to a realization that he still lived. He found himself in a silence so awful in its intensity and mystery that it made him catch his breath sharply like one does at a sudden immersion in cold water. The peace of eternity seemed to have breathed a spell upon the pitiless deep. It slept.
His long sleep had refreshed him and his mind instantly leaped back to the events of the night before. A glance round him discovered Chang, a hundred feet away, searching the horizon. Rowgowskii lay stretched on the opposite side of the fire.
Just as Emily had imagined him lost so Lavelle for a moment believed her gone. His senses went crashing, but they reordered themselves instantly at the touch of a warm body at his side.
Putting his left hand out to raise himself it fell on Emily not half an arm's length away. There exhausted nature had bent her head in slumber at midnight when the wind hushed. There Chang had covered her again with the boat sail. She lay with her right arm under her vivid head and her face toward the new day. One long golden braid curled across the hilltop's wet grass where it had been flung unconsciously in her sleep. The other hung across her exquisite bosom, rising and falling gently with her breathing, and its end trailing the ground. Such an expression as Lavelle had so often seen in the faces of play-weary children was in hers.