to the bathing-place and heard it as she stood on the tender grass of the
low bank, her robe at her feet, and looked at the reflection of her
figure on the glass-like surface of the creek. Listening to it she
walked slowly back, her wet hair hanging over her shoulders; laying down
to rest under the bright stars, she closed her eyes to the murmur of the
water below, of the warm wind above; to the voice of nature speaking
through the faint noises of the great forest, and to the song of her own
heart.

She heard, but did not understand, and drank in the dreamy joy of her new
existence without troubling about its meaning or its end, till the full
consciousness of life came to her through pain and anger. And she
suffered horribly the first time she saw Nina's long canoe drift silently
past the sleeping house of Bulangi, bearing the two lovers into the white
mist of the great river. Her jealousy and rage culminated into a
paroxysm of physical pain that left her lying panting on the river bank,
in the dumb agony of a wounded animal. But she went on moving patiently
in the enchanted circle of slavery, going through her task day after day
with all the pathos of the grief she could not express, even to herself,
locked within her breast. She shrank from Nina as she would have shrunk
from the sharp blade of a knife cutting into her flesh, but she kept on
visiting the brig to feed her dumb, ignorant soul on her own despair. She
saw Dain many times. He never spoke, he never looked. Could his eyes
see only one woman's image? Could his ears hear only one woman's voice?
He never noticed her; not once.

And then he went away. She saw him and Nina for the last time on that
morning when Babalatchi, while visiting his fish baskets, had his
suspicions of the white man's daughter's love affair with Dain confirmed
beyond the shadow of doubt. Dain disappeared, and Taminah's heart, where