He sat down presently on a heap of white stones by the roadside for a brief rest before tramping the remainder of the way. Just beside him was a tree half strangled by a growth of flaming orchids.
Here he sat, for some little time, brooding half purposefully and half dreamily. It was one of those rather rare moments when he seemed to see himself with considerable detachment. Others had been remarking the alteration in him as it so strikingly developed. Suddenly he seemed conscious of alteration himself. Life, he thought, had been bumping him along at a terrific rate. It had all begun—well, hadn’t it?—almost immediately after the historic quarrel with Stella as they walked up Market Street together in the fog and seemed, neither of them, to know just which way to turn. After that, the curtain had gone up and the play had started. Jerome musingly reviewed the immense changes that had come into his life since the day Xenophon Curry entered Oaks, Ferguson & Whitley’s in quest of provender for his songbirds and a crew as yet non-existent. And he muttered to himself as he sat now on the heap of stones resting: “No wonder I feel different!”
He rubbed his palms lightly and meditatively together and looked back along the road. From this point it dropped rather sharply into a valley, and then began a long gentle ascent, stretching far up and off among the foothills toward the legend-kissed heights of distant Kina Balu. Sometimes the road was invisible for a stretch, where a curve deflected its course; then it would slip back into view again, an ever narrowing line, but always gleaming in the white light of afternoon. The young man’s eyes idly pursued it to a far crest, and in that shimmer of distance he perceived a figure spinning along toward him on a bicycle. He watched it glide nearer and nearer, now slipping out of sight for a time, then re-emerging. The figure was a woman. He would wait, he decided, until she had come up and passed him. Then he would go on his way back to town.
She coasted down the long decline into the depression out of which rose the sharp little eminence on which Jerome was seated. Momentum carried the rider half way up the steep slope beyond. Then, instead of submitting herself to the fatiguing task of pumping the rest of the way, she dismounted and walked, wheeling her bicycle along beside her.