A step or two farther along, Captain Utterbourne remembered he had neglected to bring out a small chest of bright trash which Tsuda would pounce on eagerly—gay, valueless objects that would fit into his scheme of Ainu culture. Possibly the chest might tend to put Tsuda in a frame of mind for withholding nothing. Men like Tsuda had to be treated tenderly. The trouble with Tsuda was that he was too suspicious. Tsuda would be suspicious of a fly if it happened to look a little different from most other flies.
“Would you mind, Sargeant, going back for it now—h’m?”
So the party temporarily disbanded. Utterbourne and Sutherland went on with Tsuda, while Sargeant and Rutherford turned back toward the launch.
At this moment of disruption a wild and romantic design entered Jerome’s head and captured it entirely. In the dark he made his escape from both parties. Utterbourne supposed he had gone back with Sargeant, while the returning men thought he had gone on with Utterbourne—or rather no one gave him any deliberate thought at all. But Jerome, dodging behind a huge palm, waited until the steps in both directions had died out.
Alone on an unknown island he stood, his heart given over to a sudden wave of impulse. Stella was dead. In life their ways had been roughly sundered; in death she seemed, during this feverish, pulsing hour, given back to him again. He seemed to have achieved an intangible victory over the man who had once cast him into a humiliating discard—yes, all in the first, swift, terrible knowledge of her fate.
He would go alone to her grave—he would be the first to look upon it. Perhaps the others would not even go, since after all what is a grave? But he would go; it was his hour of triumph. Life had divided their ways, but death had brought them together again. Poor Stella. Things had turned out very differently with her from what she had hoped. Probably no one would ever know just what had taken place. She became starry with mystery and bound up in an eternal beauty of suspense. Yes, he would go to her grave; for despite what he had become, Stella must always be in his mind the woman he once loved. Indifference, while it may carry a man far, can never quite blot out a memory like that.