Love had come at last to Elaine--a love to match the strength and purpose of his own--a love overwhelming, natural, unabashed--was their rightful heritage. Its holiness gave it sanction; its rightness made it as pure as fire that makes hard metal molten.
He started slowly towards the hill whereon Elaine was busied. He halted, however, hidden from view by a new banana foliage, wondrously unrolling. Another song was floating on the air.
"_Pale hands I loved, upon the Shalimar, Where are you now? Who lies beneath thy spell? Whom do you lead on rapture's roadway jar Before you agonize them, in farewell?_
"_Pale hands I loved, upon the Shalimar, Where are you now? Where are you now?_"
The mad intoxication of his senses rocked him strangely, there in the thicket. He saw the gleam of the jeweled girdle that spanned Elaine's lithe figure, as she moved about on the brink of the terrace above. Once again his heart struck mightily against its walls, as it had the first day she had worn this gold, by way of a maid's confession.
He knew at last her Shalimar was a wild little garden of love, to be sacredly shared between them. Excited to trembling he started again to join her at the cavern. Before he could come to the foot of the trail she suddenly ran to the terrace-edge, looking down like a vision of despair.
"Sidney!" she cried, "another Dyak boat! I've just this minute seen the sail!"
Ready to curse the merciless Fates, as well as his own recent laziness, which had made calamity possible, Grenville ran swiftly up the mended trail and followed Elaine to the tree.
The sail was certainly plain enough to see, far out in the purple waters. It was, to all appearances, bearing directly down upon the island. But, as Grenville watched, it altered shape. His face showed a sign of relaxing.
"I don't believe it's a Dyak craft," he told her, hoarsely. "It looks like---- I think it's a yacht."
It certainly was a modern yacht that the two of them saw, straining their eyes to identify the stranger roving afar in their waters.
A trick of the sun, or perhaps her paint, had concealed both masts and funnel for a time, presenting only a rakish angle of her prow and quarter, incredibly like a sail of the shape the Dyaks employ.