Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/193

 returned to the Malay villages, he had remained behind. Since then he had shared the life of the inmates of the Sâkai camp, forgetful of his superiority of religion and of race, and to-night was herding naked, amid the green stuff, with the chanting jungle people. And all this had befallen him because the flashing glance from a pair of pretty eyes,, set in the face of a slender Sakai girl, had blinded him and deprived him of reason.

The wife of his own race, and the child whom he had left with her in the hul downriver, troubled him not at all. All considerations of honour and duty and of the public opinion, which in the matter of a haison with an infidel woman can, among Malays, be uncommonly rigid, were forgotten. He only knew that life no longer seemed to hold for him anything of good unless Chép, the Bird, as her people named her, could be his. In the abstract, he despised the Sakai even more vehemently than of old; but for this girl's sake he smothered his feelings, dwelt among her kinsfolk as one of themselves, losing thereby the last atom of his self-respect, and consciously risking his soul's salvation. Yet all this sacrifice of his ideals had hitherto been unavailing, for Chêp was the wife of a Sakai named Ku-ish the Porcupine who had not only declined to sell her at even the extravagant price which the Malay had offered for her, but guarded her jealously, and gave Sentul no opportunity of prosecuting his intimacy.

On her side, she had quickly divined Sentul's pas- sion for her; and as he was younger and richer than