She clung to his arm still.  He disentangled himself, gently.  The Shadow rose at the same moment, and followed in silence to the open door.  Muriel rushed after them, wildly.  “Oh, Felix, Felix, come back,” she cried, bursting into wild floods of hot, fierce tears.  “Come back and let me die with you!  Let me die!  Let me die with you!”

Felix crossed the white line without one word of reply, and went forth into the night, half unmanned by this effort.  Muriel sank, where she stood, into Mali’s arms.  The girl caught her and supported her.  But before she had fainted quite away, Muriel had time vaguely to see and note one significant fact.  The Eyes of Tu-Kila-Kila, who stood watching the huts with lynx-like care, nodded twice to Toko, the Shadow, as he passed between them; then they stealthily turned and dogged the two men’s footsteps afar off in the jungle.

Muriel was left by herself in the hut, face to face with Mali.

“Let us pray, Mali,” she cried, seizing her Shadow’s arm.

And Mali, moved suddenly by some half-obliterated impulse, exclaimed in concert, in a terrified voice, “Let us pray to Methodist God in heaven!”

For her life, too, hung on the issue of that rash endeavor.

CHAPTER XXVII.

A STRANGE ALLY.

In Tu-Kila-Kila’s temple-hut, meanwhile, the jealous, revengeful god, enshrined among his skeletons, was having in his turn an anxious and doubtful time of it.  Ever since his sacred blood had stained the dust of earth by the Frenchman’s cottage and in his own temple, Tu-Kila-Kila, for all his bluster, had been deeply stirred and terrified in his inmost soul by that unlucky portent.  A savage, even if he be a god, is always superstitious.  Could it be that his own time was, indeed, drawing nigh?  That he, who had remorselessly killed and eaten so many hundreds of human victims, was himself to fall a prey to some more successful competitor?  Had the white-faced stranger, the King of the Rain, really learned the secrets of the Great Taboo from the Soul of all dead parrots?  Did that mysterious bird speak the tongue of these new fire-bearing Korongs, whose doom was fixed for the approaching solstice?  Tu-Kila-Kila wondered and doubted.  His suspicions were keen, and deeply aroused.  Late that night he still lurked by the sacred banyan-tree, and when at last he retired to his own inner temple, white with the grinning skulls of the victims he had devoured, it was with strict injunctions to Fire and Water, and to his Eyes that watched there, to bring him word at once of any projected aggression on the part of the stranger.