It came over him with a start that the village was empty. Then he
remembered it was Sunday, and they were all in church. Thank God, there
was none to watch him; no prying, curious eyes to disturb his thoughts.
But they would soon be out again, and it behooved him to make the best
use of his solitude while he might. He struck inland, his heart beating
with a curious expectancy; at every sound he held his breath, and he
would turn quickly and look back with a haunting sense that Tehea was
near him; that perhaps she was gazing at him through the trees. He
approached his old home through overgrown plantations. It awed him to
part the branches and to feel himself drawing nearer at every step to
the only house he had ever called his own. As he heard the splashing
waterfall he stopped, not daring for the moment to go on. When at last
he did so, and mounted the little hill, he found no house at all;
nothing but ferns and weeds, man-high. He moved about here and there, up
to the armpits in verdure, in a sort of consternation at discovering it
gone.