o," he added, perplexed.

Somehow the delay, the uncertainty, began to weigh upon her like an
affront. She missed their wild communion, the high, buoying sense of
romance and emprise and impossibilities trampled under foot. She missed
the single complicity of the stream and its turbulent heartening. Here
were voices too, but these were harsh and displeasing, common human
voices. An odor of cookery and unclean hearths stole greasily down the
air. The fretful child began screaming again and went suddenly silent at
a brusque clap. Somebody fell to quarreling in a muttered monotone.

"What are you going to do?" she demanded.

"It will be better if I go search."

"You will not leave me--!"

"Only for a time. I must find someone who has a boat and borrow it. If
there are no others, the trader will lend me his."

"Gregson--?"

"He cannot know what I want of it."

"Motauri--" she cried, appalled, "keep away from that man!"

"I have used his boat before," he soothed. "It will be all right. And we
must--we must have a boat. Remember where we are."...

She had caught his wrist unwittingly, but now she released it. They
stood so for a moment. She was remembering.

"Very well," she said, subdued.

"You will be safe here," he assured her. "Stay close in the brush.
Nobody passes this last house. And when I come I will sing a little,
very quietly, to let you know. Good-bye, Hokoolele--!"

"Good-bye," she said, with a catch at her throat and a strange
foreboding.

Abruptly he had vanished....

How long Miss Matilda crouched in her thicket by the beach of Wailoa she
could not have told. It seemed an eternity. The night clouded down, even
the stars were veiled. An on-shore breeze whined forlornly across the
sands. Her fever had passed. She was damp, bedraggled, bruised and
aching, soiled with mud. The wind sought her out, cut through her limp
garments.... She waited, shivering.

She was very much alone. She felt helpless beyond anything she had ever
experienced, as if the props of life were fallen away. And so they were,
for those she had known she had thrust behind and Motauri's magic no
longer sustained her. Worse than all was the pressure gathering in her
mind, a tide of doubt that she had to deny, like the rising fill in a
lock. She dared not let herself think. Still no Motauri.

Benumbed, exhausted, sunk in hebetude, she waited until she could wait
no more, until intolerable suspense drove her blindly. She crept