Page:The Gates of Morning - Henry De Vere Stacpoole.pdf/276



HE island grew.

Poni at the wheel, his eyes wrinkled against the sun, steered; Aioma beside him, Le Moan near Aioma and Dick forward near the galley. Dick had taken his seat on the deck in a patch of shadow and now he was leaning on his side supporting himself with his elbow. The sight of this island that was not Karolin had completed the business for Dick.

For four days he had scarcely touched food and for four days Le Moan had watched him falling away from himself. It was like watching a tree wither.

There was a vine on Karolin that would sometimes take a tree in its embrace just as ivy does, grow up it and round it and cling without doing the tree any injury; but if the vine were cut away from the tree, the tree would die.

It seemed to Le Moan that Taori was like the tree and Katafa the vine.

She was right.

Seldom enough, yet every now and then you find in this wilderness of a world, amidst the thorns of hate and the poison berries of passion and the dung of beasts and the toadstools of conjugal love, a passion pure and