The Exiles of Faloo by Barry Pain

Lechworthy, instructed by Dr Soames Pryce, caught fishes with names like music and colours like the rainbow. Also, instructed by Dr Soames Pryce, he mastered the management of his simple snap-shot camera and learned developing and printing. Every day he was busy with King Smith in working out the details of the scheme for a native Faloo and preparing draft statements to advocate it in England. "My holiday!" he exclaimed to Hilda. "Why, I've never had so much to do in my life. And I like it."

Hilda, on the other hand, did very little. She had been since her illness quieter and gentler. She was listless and at times a little melancholy. She let her management of her uncle slip through her fingers, and even ceased to manage herself; she was ready for anything that Tiva or Ioia suggested, unless, of course, it happened to be something that she thought Dr Pryce would not like. Her uncle, vaguely conscious of the change in her, said that she was still a little weakened by her illness. Hilda put it all down to the enervating climate. Tiva and Ioia, who had their own ideas, produced for her a new music -- songs in the native tongue that spoke also in the universal tongue. They sang one moonlit night on the verandah outside Hilda's room, when she had just gone to bed. It was the music of ecstasy and surrender. Hilda, in her night-gown, stepped bare-footed across the room and pushed the plaited blind aside. "Tell me what the words of that mean," said Hilda.