A strange sense of loneliness fell on Billy. This was the first time since she had begun to come regularly to the island that she had cut their tryst short. He waited. She did not appear. A minute went by.

Another and another and another. His sense of loneliness deepened to uneasiness. Still there was no sign of Julia. Uneasiness became alarm.

Ah, there she was at last--a speck, a dot, a spot, a splotch. How she was flying! How--.

Like a bullet the conviction struck him.

She was falling!

Memories of certain biplanic explorations surged into his mind. "She's frozen," he thought to himself. "She can't move her wings!" Terror paralyzed him; horror bound him. He stood still-numb, dumb, helpless.

Down she came like an arrow. Her wings kept straight above her head, moveless, still. He could see her breast and shoulders heave and twist, and contort in a fury of effort. Underneath her were the trees. He had a sudden, lightning-swift vision of a falling aviator that he had once seen. The horror of what was coming turned his blood to ice. But he could not move; nor could he close his eyes.

"Oh, G.o.d! Oh, G.o.d! Oh, G.o.d!" he groaned. And, finally, "Oh, thank G.o.d!"

Julia's wings were moving. But apparently she still had little control of them. They flapped frantically a half-minute; but they had arrested her fall; they held her up. They continued to support her, although she beat about in jagged circles. Alternately floating and fluttering, she caught on an air-current, hurled herself on it, floated; then, as though she were sliding through some gigantic pillar of quiet air, sank earthwards. She seized the topmost bough of one of the high trees, threw her arms across it and hung limp. She panted; it seemed as if her b.r.e.a.s.t.s must burst. Her eyes closed; but the tears streamed from under her eyelids.

Billy ran close. He made no attempt to climb the tree to which she clung, so weakly accessible. But he called up to her broken words of a.s.surance, broken phrases of comfort that ended in a wild harangue of love and entreaty.

After a while her breath came back. She pulled herself up on the bough and sat huddled there, her eyelids down, her silvery fans drooping, the great ma.s.s of her honey-colored hair drifting over the green branches, her drapery of white lilies, slashed and hanging in tatters, the tears still streaming. Except for its ghastly whiteness, her face showed no change of expression. She did not sob or moan, she did not even speak; she sat relaxed. The tears stopped flowing gradually. Her eyelids lifted. Her eyes, stark and dark in her white face, gazed straight down into Billy's eyes.

And then Billy knew.

He stood moveless staring up at her; never, perhaps, had human eyes asked so definite a question or begged so definite a boon.

She sat moveless, staring straight down at him. But her eyes continued to withhold all answer, all rea.s.surance.

After a while, she stirred and the spell broke. She opened and shut her wings, half a dozen times before she ventured to leave her perch. But once, in the air, all her strength, physical and mental, seemed to come back. She shook the hair out of her eyes. She pulled her drapery together. For a moment, she lingered near, floating, almost moveless, white, shining, carved, chiseled: like a marvelous piece of aerial sculpture. Then a flush of a delicate dawn-pink came into her white face. She caught the great tumbled ma.s.s of hair in both hands, tied it about her head. Swift as a flash of lightning, she turned, wheeled, soared, dipped. And for the first time, Billy heard her laugh. Her laughter was like a child's--gleeful. But each musical ripple thrust like a knife into his heart.

He watched her cleave the distance, watched her disappear. Then, suddenly, a curious weakness came over him. His head swam and he could not see distinctly. Every bone in his body seemed to repudiate its function; his flexed muscles slid him gently to the earth. Time pa.s.sed.

After a while consciousness came back. His dizziness ceased. But he lay for a long while, face downward, his forehead against the cool moss.

Again and again that awful picture came, the long, white, girl-shape shooting earthwards, the ghastly, tortured face, the frenzied, heaving shoulders. It was to come again many times in the next week, that picture, and for years to make recurrent horror in his sleep.

He returned to the camp white, wrung, and weak. Apparently his companions had been busy at their various occupations. n.o.body had seen Julia's fall; at least n.o.body mentioned it. After dinner, when the nightly argument broke into its first round, he was silent for a while.

Then, "Oh, I might as well tell you, Frank, and you, Pete," he said abruptly, "that I've gone over to the other side. I'm for capture, friendship by capture, marriage by capture--whatever you choose to call it--but capture."

The other four stared at him. "What's happened to you and Ju--" Honey began. But he stopped, flushing.

Billy paid no attention to the bitten-off end of Honey's question.

"Nothing's happened to me," he lied simply and directly. "I don't know why I've changed, but I have. I think this is a case where the end justifies the means. Women don't know what's best for them. We do.

Unguided, they take the awful risks of their awful ignorance. Moreover, they are the conservative s.e.x. They have no conscious initiative. These flying-women, for instance, have plenty of physical courage but no mental or moral courage. They hold the whip-hand, of course, now.

Anything might happen to them. This situation will prolong itself indefinitely unless--unless we beat their cunning by our strategy." He paused. "I don't think they're competent to take care of themselves.

I think it's our duty to take care of them. I think the sooner--." He paused again. "At the same time, I'm prepared to keep to our agreement.

I won't take a step in this matter until we've all come round to it."

"If it wasn't for their wings," Honey said.

Billy shuddered violently. "If it wasn't for their wings," he agreed.

Frank bore Billy's defection in the spirit of cla.s.sic calm with which he accepted everything. But Pete could not seem to reconcile himself to it.

He was constantly trying to draw Billy into debate.

"I won't argue the matter, Pete," Billy said again and again. "I can't argue it. I don't pretend even to myself that I'm reasonable or logical, or just or ethical. It's only a feeling or an instinct. But it's too strong for me. I can't fight it. It's as if I'd taken a journey drugged and blindfolded. I don't know how I got on this side--but I'm here."

The effect of this was to weaken a little the friendship that had grown between Billy and Pete. Also Honey pulled a little way from Ralph and slipped nearer to his old place in Billy's regard.

But now there were three warring elements in camp. Honey, Ralph, and Billy hobn.o.bbed constantly. Frank more than ever devoted himself to his reading. Pete kept away from them all, writing furiously most of the day.

"We're going to have a harder time with him than with Frank," Billy remarked once.

"I guess we can leave that matter to take care of itself," Ralph said with one of his irritating superior smiles. "How about it, Honey?"

"Surest thing you know," Honey answered rea.s.suringly. "All you've got to do is wait--believe muh!"

"It does seem as if we'd waited pretty long," Honey himself fumed two weeks later, "I say we three get together and repudiate that agreement."

"That would be dishonorable," Billy said, "and foolish. You can see for yourself that we cannot stir a step in this matter without co-operation.

As opponents, Pete and Frank could warn the girls off faster than we could lure them on."

"That's right, too," agreed Honey. "But I'm d.a.m.ned tired of this," he added drearily. "Not more tired than we are," said Billy.

An incident that varied the monotony of the deadlock occurred the next day. Pete Murphy packed up food and writing materials and, without a word, decamped into the interior. He did not return that day, that night, or the next day, or the next night.

"Say, don't you think we ought to go after him," Billy said again and again, "something may have happened."

And, "No!" Honey always answered. "Trust that Dogan to take care of himself. You can't kill him."

Pete worked gradually across the island to the other side. There the beach was slashed by many black, saw-toothed reefs. The sea leaped up upon them on one side and the trees bore down upon them on the other.

The air was filled with tumult, the hollow roar of the waves, the strident hum of the pines. For the first day, Pete entertained himself with exploration, clambering from one reef to another, pausing only to look listlessly off at the horizon, climbing a pine here and there, swinging on a bough while he stared absently back over the island. But although his look fixed on the restless peac.o.c.k glitter of the sea, or the moveless green cushions that the ma.s.sed trees made, it was evident that it took no account of them; they served only the more closely to set his mental gaze on its half-seen vision.

The second morning, he arose, bathed, breakfasted, lay for an hour in the sun; then drew pencil and paper from his pack. He wrote furiously.

If he looked up at all, it was only to gaze the more fixedly inwards.

But mainly his head hung over his work.

In the midst of one of these periods of absorption, a flower fell out of the air on his paper. It was a brilliant, orange-colored tropical bloom, so big and so freshly plucked that it dashed his verse with dew. For an instant he stared stupidly at it. Then he looked up.

Just above him, not very high, her green-and-gold wings spread broad like a b.u.t.terfly's, floated Clara. Her body was sheathed in green vines, delicately shining. Her hair was wreathed in fluttering yellow orchid-like flowers, her arms and legs wound with them. She was flying lower than usual. And, under her wreath of flowers, her eyes looked straight into his.

Pete stared at her stupidly as he had stared at the flower. Then he frowned. Deliberately he dropped his eyes. Deliberately he went on writing.

Whir-r-r-r-r! Pete looked up again. Clara was beating back over the island, a tempest of green-and-gold.

Again, he concentrated on his work.

Pete wrote all the rest of the day and by firelight far into the night. He wrote all the next morning. In the middle of the afternoon, a seash.e.l.l struck his paper, glanced off.

It was Clara again.

This time, apparently, she had come from the ocean. Sea-kelp, still glistening with brine, encased her close as with armor. A little pointed cap of kelp covered her tawny hair as with a helmet. That gave her a piquant quality of boyishness. She was flying lower than he had ever seen her, and as Pete's eyelids came up she dropped nearer, threw herself into one of her sinuous poses, arms and legs outstretched close, hands and feet cupped, wrists, ankles, hips, shoulders all moving. She looked straight down into Pete's eyes; and this time she smiled.

Pete stared for another long moment. Then as though summoning all his resolution, he withdrew his eyes, nailed them to his paper. Clara peppered him with sh.e.l.ls and pebbles; but he continued to ignore her. He did not look up again until a whir-r-r-r-r--loud at first but steadily diminishing--apprised him of her flight.