The islanders listened, as if spellbound; but she could not tell whether the music went home to any of them, except the boy who lay at her feet with his eyes fixed on her face. When the last notes died away, the crowd broke into applause, with cries of "Malo! Malo!" But the boy lay still, looking at her, as a dog looks at his mistress. Then the moonlight glistened in his eyes, and she thought that she saw tears. She bent forward a little to make sure. He rose with a smile, and lifted her hand to his face, so that she might feel that his eyes were wet. "Tears," he said, "and I only listen. But you--you make the music, and no tears are in your eyes." He looked into her face. "No," she said, "there are no tears in my eyes." Then she continued hurriedly, as if speaking to herself (and perhaps only a musician would have felt that the catch in her voice went a little deeper than tears): "That's one of the things you lose when you go in for music. It used to be so with me, too." "I like your music," the boy went on. "My father--English sailor. My mother--learn speak English--from him. She teach me. My father only stay here little time. I never see English people before this." Rachel looked at him with a quick realization of what his words meant. The boy was at least eighteen years old. "You remember no ship coming to this island?" she said. "No. I never see my father. He only stay here little time. My mother think for long time he will come again. That is how she die, only a little time ago. Too much waiting. Make some more music. You have made my ears hungry." But Rachel was facing the truth now, and she played and sang no more that night. III For a week or two, Rachel spent much time alone, thinking hard, thinking things out as she had never done before. She did not quite understand her isolation till the first shock of the full discovery had passed. Then, one morning, sitting alone, and gazing out over the spotless blue, she found herself accepting the plain fact, that this might indeed be for ever. She found herself weighing all the chances, all that she had lost, and all that yet remained to her. It dawned upon her, for the first time, that youth does not lightly surrender the fulness of its life, at the first disillusionment. She knew now that she would have recovered from that first disastrous love-affair. She knew now that she had always known it, and that her search had been only for some healing dittany, some herb of grace that would heal her wound more quickly. She faced it all--the loss of her birthright as a woman, the loss of the unknown lover. She saw herself growing old in this loneliness.