Paradise?
Who had named those birds the birds of paradise?
She recollected how the feathers which Ella had whirled about had held in the very center of every wonderful disc of rich purple, edged with unequal radiating lines of gold, a single spot of brilliant crimson, with a tiny star of silver in the center.

The effect of the sunlight glinting over this combination on the thousand feathers that swept after the bird had caused Herbert Courtland, the first white man who had seen this glory of glories, to call it the meteor-bird.

But those crimson drops: were they not the blood of the men who had perished miserably while endeavoring to wrest its marvels from the tropical forests of that great island?
Paradise?
And Ella could treat those feathers as though they had been plucked from a tame pheasant?
And now she was lying in her bed with the fan on the pillow beside her! How could she do it?
That was what the girl asked herself while she lay awake on her own bed.

Would Ella not see, on the white pillow beside her head, the crimson stains of the feathers that had been snatched out of the dripping red hand of death, but the man who had not feared to grapple with death itself in that hell which people called a paradise?
But the man, the man who had gripped death by the throat and had torn the feathers from his grisly, fleshless fingers,--her imagination was very vivid at night, especially after reading a thrilling chapter of Hebrew massacre,--that man had talked with her upon such trifles as books and plays, strange pageants enacted among paper and canvas unrealities of life.

She had actually been leaning against some of these painted scenes while the man who had fought his way into the depths of that forest which no white man but himself had yet penetrated,--the man whose life had, day by day and night by night, been dependent upon the accuracy of his rifle aim,--had talked with her.
That was really the sum of all her thoughts.