"I'll start the first thing in the morning. It's been
disgraceful the way I've been hanging on here. Good-night."
Sheldon, sitting on alone, wondered if the other man would have decided
to pull out in the morning had Joan not sailed away. Well, there was one
bit of consolation in it: Joan had certainly lingered at Berande for no
man, not even Tudor. "I start in an hour"--her words rang in his brain,
and under his eyelids he could see her as she stood up and uttered them.
He smiled. The instant she heard the news she had made up her mind to
go. It was not very flattering to man, but what could any man count in
her eyes when a schooner waiting to be bought in Sydney was in the wind?
What a creature! What a creature!
* * * * *
Berande was a lonely place to Sheldon in the days that followed. In the
morning after Joan's departure, he had seen Tudor's expedition off on its
way up the Balesuna; in the late afternoon, through his telescope, he had
seen the smoke of the _Upolu_ that was bearing Joan away to Sydney; and
in the evening he sat down to dinner in solitary state, devoting more of
his time to looking at her empty chair than to his food. He never came
out on the veranda without glancing first of all at her grass house in
the corner of the compound; and one evening, idly knocking the balls
about on the billiard table, he came to himself to find himself standing
staring at the nail upon which from the first she had hung her Stetson
hat and her revolver-belt.
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