Already many were choosing the first, and those that turned in the hope of regaining the launch were shot down or captured before they reached the water. The prisoners, disarmed, stood aside in a little sulky group under the guard of one islander, watching, resignedly, and with a certain indifference born of their own secession from activity, the swaying clump of men, shouting, swearing, and stumbling, and the feeble efforts of the wounded to drag themselves out of the way of the trampling feet. The sand of the beach was in some places, where blood had been spilt, stamped into a dark mud. A wounded soldier, lying half in and half out of the water, cried out pitiably as the salt water lapped over his wounds. The decision was hastened by the crew of the launch, who, seeing a bare dozen of their companions rapidly overpowered by a superior number of islanders, and having themselves no fancy to be picked off at leisure from the shore, started their engines and made off to sea. At that a cry of dismay went up; retreat, as an alternative, was entirely withdrawn; death an empty and unnecessary display of heroism; surrender remained; they chose it thankfully. III Julian never knew, nor did he stop to inquire, why Eve had returned to the village without his sanction. He only knew that as he came up the street, escorted by all the population, singing, pressing around him, taking his hands, throwing flowers and even fruit in his path, holding up their children for him to touch, he saw her standing in the doorway of their house, the lighted courtyard yellow behind her. She stood there on the highest of the three steps, her hands held out towards him. He knew, too, although no word was spoken, that the village recognised them as lovers. He felt again the triumphant completeness of life; a fulfilment, beyond the possibility of that staid world that, somewhere, moved upon its confused, mercenary, mistaken, and restricted way. Here, the indignities of hypocrisy were indeed remote. There, men shorn of candour entangled the original impulse of their motives until in a sea of perplexity they abandoned even to the ultimate grace of self-honesty; here, in an island of enchantment, he had fought for his dearest and most constituent beliefs--O honourable privilege! unhindered and rare avowal!--fought, not with secret weapons, but with the manhood of his body; and here, under the eyes of fellow-creatures, their presence no more obtrusive than the presence of the sea or the evening breeze, under their unquestioning eyes he claimed the just reward, the consummation, the right of youth, which in that pharisaical world would have been denied him.