The excitement of this had hardly died down when Frank Merrill brought the tale of another adventure to camp.  He had fallen into the habit of withdrawing late in the afternoon to one of the reefs, far enough away to read and to write quietly.  One day, just as he had gone deep into his book, a shadow fell across it.  Startled, he looked up.  Directly over his head, pasted on the sky like a scarlet V, hovered the “dark one.”  After his first instant of surprise and a second interval of perplexity, he put his book down, settled himself back quietly, and watched.  Conscious of his espionage apparently, she flew away, floated, flew back, floated, flew up, flew down, floated — always within a little distance.  After half an hour of this aerial irresolution, she sailed off.  She repeated her performance the next afternoon and the next, and the next, staying longer each time.  By the end of the week she was spending whole afternoons there.  She, too, became a regular visitor.

She never spoke.  And she scarcely moved.  She waved her great scarlet wings only fast enough to hold herself beyond Frank’s reach.  But from that distance she watched his movements, watched closely and unceasingly, watched with the interest of a child at a moving-picture show.  Her surveillance of him was so intense it seemed impossible that she could see anything else.  But if one of the other four men started to join them, she became a flash of scarlet lightning that tore the distance.

Frank, of course, found this interesting.  Every day he made voluminous notes of his observations.  Every night be embodied these notes in his monograph.

“What does she look like close to?” the others asked him again and again.

“Really, I’ve hardly had a chance to notice yet,” was Frank’s invariable answer.  “She’s a comely young person, I should say, and, as you can easily see, of the brunette coloring.  I’m so much more interested in her flying than in her appearance that I’ve never really taken a good look at her.  Unfortunately she flies less well than the others.  I wish I could get a chance to study all of them — the ‘quiet one’ in particular; she flies so much faster.  On the other hand, this one seems able to hold herself motionless in the air longer than they.”

“She’s lazy,” Honey Smith said decisively.  “I got that right off.  She looks like a Spanish woman and she is a good deal like one in her ways.”

Honey was right; the “dark one” was lazy.  Alone she always flew low, and at no time, even in company, did she dare great altitudes.  She seemed to love to float, wings outspread and eyes half closed, on one of those tranquil air-plateaux that lie between drifting air-currents.  She was an adept, apparently, at finding the little nodule of quiet space that forms the center of every windstorm.  Standing upright in it, flaming wings erect, she would whirl through space like an autumn leaf.  Gradually, she became less suspicious of the other men.  She often passed in their direction on the way to her afternoon vigil with Frank.