riends, and yet I am powerless to help them.

May 10th (later).--My husband, who has now returned from San Francisco,
knows that Jasper is here and speaks of it. I fear these moods of
confidence and kindness. "Your friend has come," Edmond says; "but why
am I not to know of it? Why is he frightened of me? Why does he skulk
like a thief? Let him show himself at this house and state his
business; I shall not eat him!" Edmond, I believe, has moments when he
tries to persuade himself that he is a good man. They are dangerous
moments, if all a man's better instincts are dead and forgotten.

May 11th.--Clair-de-Lune, Edmond tells me, has been sent to the lower
reef. I do not ask him why. It was he who helped my friends in the
hills. Is it all real or did I dream it? Jasper Begg, the one man who
befriended me, left to die as so many have been left on this unpitying
shore! It cannot be--it cannot be! All that I had hoped and planned
must be forgotten now. And yet there were those who remembered Ruth
Bellenden and came here for love of her, as she will remember them, for
love's sake.

[Illustration: The drawing-room is a cave whose walls are of jewels.]

May 13th.--The alarm bell rang on the island last night and we left in
great haste for the shelter. The dreadful mists were already rising
fast when I went down through the woods to the beach. The people fled
wildly to the lower reef. It is not three months since the sleep-time,
and its renewal was unlooked for. To-night I do not think of my own
safety, but of those we are leaving on the heights. What is to become
of Jasper, my friend--who will help him? I think of Jasper before any
other now. Does he, I wonder, so think of me?

May 13th (later).--The House Under the Sea is built inside the reef
which ties about a mile away on the northern side of the island. There
can be nothing like it in the world. Hundreds of years ago, perhaps,
this lonely rock, rising out of the water, was the mouth of some great
volcano. To-day it is the door of our house, and when you enter it you
find that the rocks below have been hollowed out by Nature in a manner
so wonderful that a great house lies there with stone-cold rooms and
immense corridors and pits seeming to go to the heart of the world.
None but a man with my husband's romantic craving would have discovered
such a place, or built himself therein a house so wonderful. For
imagine a suite of rooms above which the tides surge--rooms l