All that remained of her was the boat, the lesser¹ of the two boats which Aioma had saved for the moment.
 
The island was without a single canoe, and he intended to build one as swiftly as might be for the fishing; that being done he would destroy the boat and so obliterate² the last trace of the cursed papalagi.
 
So he set to work and the work progressed, Le Moan helping³ with the others. She worked at the making of the sail, Kanoa helping her, happy, ignorant of her utter deadness to all things, yet sometimes wondering.
 
Sometimes this woman he had taken to his heart seemed indeed a spirit or a lost soul as she had seemed to him that time before the killing⁴ of Carlin; always she was remote from him in mind, untouchable as the gulls⁵ he had chased as a child on Soma. Yet she was his and she let him love her,—and “Time,” said the heart of Kanoa, “will bring her arms around me.”
 
Her strangeness and indifference⁶ increased his passion. A child and yet a man, he moved now in a wonder world, he was always singing when alone and there was something in his voice that made it different from the voices of the others, so that when the women heard him singing in the groves⁷ they said “That is Kanoa.”
 
And despite his happiness in her and his love for her and his embraces, despite the joy of new life that filled Karolin and the beauty of the nights in which Taori and Katafa walked together on the reef, never once did the desire come to Le Moan to destroy herself—all that was nothing to her now.
 
She had torn out her heart and nothing else mattered, even life.
 
“And to-morrow or next day,” one morning said Aioma, “the canoe will be ready and we will burn the lesser ayat as we burned the greater. Ah hai, what is this, the reef is lifting before my eyes—Look you, Tahuku!”
 
But Tahuku saw nothing. The reef was solid as of old and the sun was shining on it and he said so.
 
The canoe-builder shut his eyes and when he opened them again the reef had ceased to lift, but he was weary. Bells rang in his ears and his hands were hot and dry and now after a while and towards midday one of the papalagi—so it seemed to him—had seized him from behind and tied a band round his head, screwing it so tight that he would have screamed had he been an ordinary man.
 
He lay on the ground, and as he lay a woman, one of the wives of Poni, came running, panting as she ran.
 
“I burn, I burn!” cried the woman. &ld............