One afternoon, Frank started on one of the long walks which latterly he had abandoned.  He left three of his underlings behind.  Pete painted a water-color; Clara, weaving back and forth, watched his progress.  Ralph worked on the big cabin — they called it the Clubhouse — Peachy whirling back and forth in wonderful air-patterns for his benefit.  A distant speck of silver indicated Julia; Billy must be on the reef.  Honey had left camp fifteen minutes before for the solitary afternoon tramp that had become a daily habit with him.

Frank’s path lay part-way through the jungle.  For half an hour he walked so sunk in thought that he glanced neither to the right nor the left.  Then he stopped suddenly, held by some invisible, intangible, impalpable force.  He listened.  The air hummed delicately, hummed with an alien element, hummed with something that was neither the susurrus of insects nor the music of birds.  He moved onward slowly and quietly.  The hum grew and strengthened.  It became a sound.  It divided into component parts, whistlings, trillings, twitterings, callings.  Bird-like they were — but they could come only from the human throat.  Impersonal they were — and yet they were sexed, female and male.  Frank looked about him carefully.  A little distance away, the trail sent off a tiny feeler into the jungle.  It dipped into one of the pretty glades which diversified the flatness of the island.  Creeping slowly, Frank followed the sound.

Half-way down the slope, Honey Smith was standing, staring upwards.  In his virile, bronzed semi-nudity, he might have been a god who had emerged for the first time into the air from the woods at his back.  His lips were open and from them came sound.

Above him, almost within reach, Lulu floated, gazing downward.  She had a listening look; and she listened fascinated.  She seemed to lie motionless on the air.  It was the first time that Merrill had seen Lulu so close.  But in some mysterious way he knew that there was something abnormal about her.  Her piquant Kanaka face shone with a strange emotion.  Her narrow eyes were big with wonder; her blood-red lips had trembled open.  She stared at Honey as if she were seeing him from a new angle.  She stared, but sound came from her parted lips.

It was Honey who whistled and called.  It was Lulu who twittered and trilled.  No mating male bird could have put more of entreating tenderness into his voice.  No mating female bird could have answered with more perplexity of abandon.

For a moment Frank stared.  Then, with a sudden sense of eavesdropping, he moved noiselessly back until he struck the main trail.

He kept on until he came to the shady side of his favorite reef.  He took from his pocket a book and began to read.  To his surprise and discomfort, he could not get into it.  Something psychological kept coming between him and the printed page.  He tried to concentrate on a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase.  It was like eating granite.  It was like drinking dust.  He stared at the words, but they seemed to float off the page.