He did not stir until she had drifted out of earshot, had become again a nebulous silver cloud drifting into the dusk, had merged with that dusk.

“What makes your eyes shine so?” said Honey, examining him keenly when he reached camp.

It was the first time Billy had known Julia to fly low.  But he discovered gradually that only in the sunlight did she haunt the zenith.  At twilight she always kept close to the earth.  Billy took to haunting the reefs at dusk.

Again and again, the same thing happened.

Suddenly — and it was as if successive waves of electricity charged through his body — the quiet air began to purr and vibrate and drum.  Out of the star-shot dusk emerged the speeding whiteness of Julia.  Always, as she approached, she slowed her flight.  Always as she passed, her sorrowing gray eyes would seek his burning blue ones.  Billy could bring himself to speak of this strange experience to nobody, not even to Honey.  For there was in it something untellable, unsharable, the wonder of the vision and the dream, the unreality of the apparition.

The excitement of these happenings kept the men entertained, but it also kept them keyed up to high tension.  For a while they did not notice this themselves.  But when they attempted to go back to their interrupted work, they found it hard to concentrate upon it.  Frank Merrill had given up trying to make them patrol the beach.  Unaided, day and night he attended to their signals.

“Well,” said Honey Smith one day and, for the first time, there was a peevish note in his voice, “that ‘natural selection’ theory of yours, Ralph, seems to have worked out to some extent — but not enough.  We seem to be comfortably divided, all ten of us, into happy couples, but hanged if I’m strong for this long-distance acquaintance.”

“You’re right there,” Ralph Addington admitted; “we don’t seem to be getting any forwarder.”

“It’s all very pretty and romantic to have these girls flying about,” Honey continued in a grumbling tone, “but it’s too much like flirting with a canary-bird.  Damn it all, I want to talk with them.”

Ralph made a hopeless gesture.  “It is a deadlock, I admit.  I’m at my wits’ end.”

Perhaps Honey expressed what the others felt.  At any rate, a sudden irascibility broke out among them.  They were good-natured enough while the girls were about, but over their work and during their leisure, they developed what Honey described as every kind of blue-bean, sourball, katzenjammer and grouch.”  They fought heroically against it — and their method of fighting took various forms, according to the nature of the four men.  Frank Merrill lost himself in his books.  Pete Murphy began the score of an opera vaguely heroic in theme; he wrote every spare moment.  Billy Fairfax worked so hard that he grew thin.  Honey Smith went off on long, solitary walks.  Ralph Addington, as usual, showed an exasperating tendency towards contradiction, an unvarying contentiousness.