She had feared some demonstration of the passion shown on the ship--or at least some disturbing outburst she had armed herself to quench. But this--such scant courtesy or gratitude as this--left her absolutely impotent and baffled. She was piqued, disappointed, chagrined. It was horrid of anyone, she was sure, to be so outrageously unfeeling. There was nothing, however, she could do, and nothing she could say. Standing there, mortified, almost angry, and conscious she was burning guiltily red with various emotions that he did not even notice, was such a footless and irritating proceeding, with the situation robbed of its point. She turned away, fairly ready to cry with vexation, and pretended to make herself busy with things already well prepared for their evening meal. But the new rebellion of her nature, partially begotten by the uncontrolled and uncontrollable impulses loosed in the jungle the previous night, when Grenville lay helplessly stunned, with his head loosely pillowed on her knee, was not to be longer contained. She presently fled from before the cavern, across, through the shadows of the terrace, to the hidden shelf where Grenville had angled for fish. There she suddenly sank to her knees on the rocks and covered her face with her hands. "I hate him!" she said, in a hot and passionate utterance, suggestive of a sob. "I hate him! I hate him! I hate every man that ever lived--and you, Gerald Fenton, as much as all the others!" She snatched off the ring from her finger. It was Fenton's ring, with a single stone that gleamed in the failing light. It seemed to her to represent the man far absent from her side. "It was you who brought it all about!" she continued, in her fiercely waging conflict, and, overwrought, she cast it down on the ledge as if it burned her palm. It bounded lightly where it struck and, clearing the shelf, fell swiftly downward to the water. A gasp and a moan escaped her lips together. Vividly, of a sudden, she remembered Grenville's prediction that she would throw it away in the sea. "Oh, Gerald, I didn't mean to!" she moaned. "I didn't! You've got to believe me!" She sank farther forward on the ledge, her face closely hidden in the curve of her loose brown arm. She wept and wept there, bitterly, in a mood of mixed emotions. "I hate him! I hate him!" she said, as before. "It's not my fault in the least!" And after a time, as Grenville did not come, she returned to the camp alone. CHAPTER XXI MOLTEN METAL AND HOPES The following day was calmer for Elaine, and vastly interesting, since Grenville's smelting operations were begun. She told herself that interest only laid its hold upon her nature, and, being a woman, she knew.