A calm “boy,” in sky-blue gown, stood beside them, ready to speak.  The dispute paused, while they turned for his message.  It was a disappointing trifle:  Mrs. Forrester waited below for her husband, to walk home.

“Can’t leave now,” snapped Gilly.  “I’ll be along, tell her—­”

“Had she better go alone?” suggested Heywood.

“No; right you are.”  The other swept a fretful eye about the company.  “But this business begins to look urgent.—­Here, somebody we can spare.  You go, Hackh, there’s a good chap.”

Chantel dropped the helmet he had caught up.  Bowing stiffly, Rudolph marched across the room and down the stairs.  His face, pale at the late spectacle, had grown red and sulky, “Can spare me, can you?—­I’m the one.”  He descended, muttering.

Viewing himself thus, morosely, as rejected of men, he reached the compound gate to fare no better with the woman.  She stood waiting in the shadow of the wall; and as he drew unwillingly near, the sight of her—­to his shame and quick dismay—­made his heart leap in welcome.  She wore the coolest and severest white, but at her throat the same small furbelow, every line of which he had known aboard ship, in the days of his first exile and of his recent youth.  It was now as though that youth came flooding back to greet her.

“Good-morning.”  He forgot everything, except that for a few priceless moments they would be walking side by side.

She faced him with a start, never so young and beautiful as now—­her blue eyes wide, scornful, and blazing, her cheeks red and lips trembling, like a child ready to cry.

“I did not want you” she said curtly.

“Nor did they.”  Pride forged the retort for him, at a blow.  He explained in the barest of terms, while she eyed him steadily, with every sign of rising temper.

“I can spare you, too,” she whipped out; then turned to walk away, holding her helmet erect, in the poise of a young goddess, pert but warlike.

This double injustice left Rudolph chafing.  In two strides, however, he had overtaken her.

“I am under orders,” he stated grimly.

Her pace gradually slackened in the growing heat; but she went forward with her eyes fixed on the littered, sunken flags of their path.  This rankling silence seemed to him more unaccountable and deadly than all former mischances, and left him far more alone.  From the sultry tops of bamboos, drooping like plants in an oven, an amorous multitude of cicadas maintained the buzzing torment of steel on emery wheels, as though the universal heat had chafed and fretted itself into a dry, feverish utterance.  Once Mrs. Forrester looked about, quick and angry, like one ready to choke that endless voice.  But for the rest, the two strange companions moved steadily onward.

In an alley of checkered light a buffalo with a wicker nose-ring, and heavy, sagging horns that seemed to jerk his head back in agony, heaved toward them, ridden by a naked yellow infant in a nest-like saddle of green fodder.  Scenting with fright the disgusting presence of white aliens, the sleep-walking monster shied, opened his eyes, and lowered his blue muzzle as if to charge.  There was a pause, full of menace.