osed her eyes, and
lay as still as still, scarce breathing. Joel bent over her softly; and
he touched her head, clumsily, with his hand, and patted it, and went
away again, closing her door behind him. She heard him tell Mark: "Aye,
she's fast asleep."

The brothers sat by Joel's desk, in the cabin across the stern; and Mark,
without preamble, told his story there. Priss, ten feet away, heard every
word; and she lay huddled beneath the blankets, eyes staring upward into
the darkness of her cabin; and as she listened, she shuddered and
trembled and shrank at the terror and wonder and ugliness of the tale he
told. No Desdemona ever listened with such half-caught breath....

VIII

"You're blaming me," said Mark, when he and Joel were puffing at their
pipes, "for leaving my ship."

Joel said slowly: "No. But I do not understand it."

Mark laughed, a soft and throaty laugh. "You would not, Joel. You would
not. For you never felt an overwhelming notion that you must dance in the
moon upon the sand. You've never felt that, Joel; and--I have."

"I'm not a hand for dancing," said Joel.

Mark seemed to forget that his brother sat beside him. His eyes became
misty and thoughtful, as though he were living over again the days of
which he spoke. "Mind, Joel," he said, "there's a pagan in every man of
us. And there's two pagans in some of us. And I'm minded, Joel, that
there are three of them in me. 'Twas so, that night."

"It was night when you left the ship?"

"Aye, night. Night, and the moon; and it may have been that I had been
drinking a drop or two. Also, as you shall see, I was not well. I tell
these things, not by way of excuse and palliation; but only so that you
may understand. D'ye see? I was three pagans in one body, and that body
witched by moon, and twisted by drink, and trembling with fever. And so
it was I went ashore, and flung my men behind me, and went off, dancing,
along the hard sand.

"That was a night, Joel. A slow-winded, warm, trembling night when there
was a song in the very air. The wind tingled on your throat like a
woman's finger tips; and the sea was singing at the one side, and the
wind in the palms on the other. And ahead of me, the wild, discordant
chanting of the Islanders about their fires.... That singing it was that
got me by the throat, and led me. I twirled around and around, very
solemnly, by myself in the moonlight on the sand; and all the time I went
onward toward the fires