to do! I should be nonplussed."

"Oh, it's just a knack," said Jane, carelessly. "You soon pick it up."

"Nail-scissors!"

"It ruined them, unfortunately. They were never any use again. For the
rest of the trip I had to manicure myself with a hunting-spear."

"You're a marvel!"

Eustace lay back in bed and gave himself up to meditation. He had
admired Jane Hubbard before, but the intimacy of the sick-room and the
stories which she had told him to relieve the tedium of his invalid
state had set the seal on his devotion. It has always been like this
since Othello wooed Desdemona. For three days Jane Hubbard had been
weaving her spell about Eustace Hignett, and now she monopolised his
entire horizon. She had spoken, like Othello, of antres vast and deserts
idle, rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touched heaven, and of
the cannibals that each other eat, the Anthropophagi, and men whose
heads do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear would Eustace
Hignett seriously incline, and swore, in faith, 'twas strange, 'twas
passing strange, 'twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful. He loved her for
the dangers she had passed, and she loved him that he did pity them. In
fact, one would have said that it was all over except buying the
licence, had it not been for the fact that his very admiration served to
keep Eustace from pouring out his heart. It seemed incredible to him
that the queen of her sex, a girl who had chatted in terms of equality
with African head-hunters and who swatted alligators as though they were
flies, could ever lower herself to care for a man who looked like the
"after-taking" advertisement of a patent food.

But even those whom Nature has destined to be mates may misunderstand
each other, and Jane, who was as modest as she was brave, had come
recently to place a different interpretation on his silence. In the last
few days of the voyage she had quite made up her mind that Eustace
Hignett loved her and would shortly intimate as much in the usual
manner; but, since coming to Windles, she had begun to have doubts. She
was not blind to the fact that Billie Bennett was distinctly prettier
than herself and far more the type to which the ordinary man is
attracted. And, much as she loathed the weakness and despised herself
for yielding to it, she had become distinctly jealous of her. True,
Billie was officially engaged to Bream Mortimer, but she had had
experience of the brittleness of Miss Bennett's en