His eyes filled, and he was overcome by the sudden boyish craving to see something belonging to her and touch it. It seemed to him now that he and she had really parted long ago; that the laughing child who had helped him to unpack the lunch from that suitcase had for months past been farther from him than there were miles between Paul's Landing and California. He had not meant it to be so; had not been aware that it was so—but now it came over him that perhaps, for Laura Lou, the knot had long since been untied, that the anonymous letter had been a pretext long waited for, perhaps provoked. At the thought, the physical sense of her stole back on him; it was clinging and potent, like the perfume of a garden in June. Vance bent over the suitcase, and hardly knowing what he did, pushed open the lock and lifted the lid. Her poor little possessions had been crammed in carelessly and in haste, and on top, flattened out and disjointed, lay the old stuffed dove from the gilt basket he had sent to her mother.

The sight caught him by the throat. He knelt for a long time, clutching the limp moth-eaten bird in both hands. He had not thought of the dove for ages—but he remembered now having noticed that she had fastened it by a wire above the little looking glass on her chest of drawers. It had hung there, a little crooked, with one wing limp, ever since they had come back from their honeymoon.

He had hardly noticed it; but she had remembered, in the haste and grief of her going, to unfasten it from its perch and cram it into her bursting suitcase. "But if she feels like that, why is she going?" The thought rushed through him like a burst of warm rain in spring, softening, vivifying. He was afraid of nothing now, with the old stuffed dove in his hand! He stood up, pressing it to him, as the wheels of Dixon's carryall halted before the gate.

Part 6

Chapter 1

"Under a waning moon the little fleet stood out from Pondicherry … "

Vance sat lost in his vision. The phrase had murmured in his brain all day. Pondicherry—where was it? He didn't even know. Memories of the movies furnished the vague exoticism of the scene: clustered palms, arcaded houses, dusky women with baskets of tropical fruit. But lower than this surface picture, of which the cinema had robbed him, the true Pondicherry—his—hung before him like a mirage, remote, rare and undefiled… . Pondicherry! What a name! Its magic syllables concealed the subject of his new tale, as flower petals curve over the budding fruit… . He saw a harbour lit by a heavy red moon, the dusty cobblestones of the quay, a low blue-white house with a terrace over the water… .