"Now I have passed from death unto life, for you are worth it all. I am glad to tell you so on this very spot. Here where I saw you first. Look," he said, rising and drawing her up close to him. They stepped to the very brink of the cliff.
The whole great cup was now brilliantly illuminated by the moonlight, which streamed straight through the rift and turned the black water far beneath them into a still mirror of polished silver.
"I lay there on the sand, half-fainting, half-dead, staring upward at these grim, forbidding walls, when, as the sunlight broke through the rift, I saw you for the first time. I never had seen anything so beautiful, so dazzling to the eye. I was doubtful whether you were a human being even. I thought you might be some vision, some spirit of the air, some messenger from the sun."
"Do the men in that world whence you came all talk like you, Beek--man?" queried Truda, using the only name she knew him by.
"None," answered the man, "because none of them have ever seen you."
In such sweet and passionate converse the night hours drew on unmarked until the gray light on the horizon bespoke the coming of dawn.
"We must go back," said the girl, withdrawing herself for the last time from the sweet embrace. "I would not have any one find us here. In the morning I shall tell Kobo that I will have no other man but you."
"Let us wait," said the man, "until I have visited that building and wrested from it the secrets that must be there, then we shall tell him and you shall be my wife."
"I know not that English word yet, but you will be my man, and I will be your woman when Kobo, without whom these things cannot rightly be, shall have worshipped the spirits and said the words."
"It is well. You say Kobo only sleeps in the building this one night?"
"I will come with you," said the girl, "although I am very fearful."
"If they hurt you they must hurt me, too; for without you," she went on frankly, "I cannot live upon this island."
Now, Truda was terribly afraid to visit the mysterious house--one doesn’t get rid of a taboo inherited through two hundred years in a night--but her timidity had been somewhat modified by the indifference with which the man she loved and whom, she revered as a god, viewed the whole situation, at least from a supernatural standpoint, and, as of old, knowledge was power.