Page:The Gates of Morning - Henry De Vere Stacpoole.pdf/296

 knees beside her—all that was nothing now to Le Moan.

Since the night when he had saved her from Rantan, he had been closer to her than the other men of the schooner, but still only a figure, almost an abstraction.

To-night, now, he was a little more than that, as a dog might be to a lonely person, and as he poured out his heart in whispers she listened without replying, let him put his arm around her and take her lips; all that was nothing now to her whose heart would never quicken again.

The wind died, day broke, and the wind of morning blew.

Joy and the sun leapt on Karolin. Joy for Katafa who came from the house to look at a world renewed, for the women whose husbands had returned, for the men, for the children. Joy for Kanoa, his soul shouting in him, “She is mine, she is mine,” and for Aioma, the lust of revenge and destruction alive and dancing in his heart.

He had killed the green ship; this morning he would kill the schooner; the cursed ayat, that he had yet loved so dearly only a week ago, was doomed to die.

He hated it now with an entirely new and delicious brand of hatred and if he could have staked it out on the reef for the sharks to devour, so would he have done.

It had given him the scare of his life, it had all but snapped him away from Karolin, it had caused ancestral voices to rise cursing him for his folly and