When I
find her, I shall hold up the beads to her eyes in the sunlight and
compare them."
"What is the golden silence like?" asked Stephen. "Do you see more
clearly, now that at last you've come to Africa?"
"I couldn't see more clearly than I did before," the girl answered
slowly, looking away from him, through the green lace of the trees that
veiled the distance. "Yet it's just as mysterious as ever. I can't guess
yet what it can be, unless it's in the desert. I just see Saidee,
standing on a large, flat expanse which looks white. And she's dressed
in white. All round her is a quivering golden haze, wave after wave of
it, endless as the sea when you're on a ship. And there's silence--not
one sound, except the beating which must be my own heart, or the blood
that sings in my ears when I listen for a long time--the kind of singing
you hear in a shell. That's all. And the level sun shining in her eyes,
and on her hair."
"It is a picture," said Stephen.
"Wherever Say was, there would always be a picture," Victoria said with
the unselfish, unashamed pride she had in her sister.
"How I hope Saidee knows I'm near her," she went on, half to herself.
"She'd know that I'd come to her as soon as I could--and she may have
heard things about me that would tell her I was trying to make money
enough for the journey and everything. If I hadn't hoped she _might_ see
the magazines and papers, I could never have let my photograph be
published.
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