all the pleasure away from the find, she sat down on the rocks
forming the mound and holding the paper in her fingers gave way for a
moment to a depression that came against her like a black, surging sea.
Then she remembered that the cross had been only visible from one point,
that vessels might have been here and not have seen it, that men might
even have landed and found it without leaving the fact behind them,
after the manner of the writer of this paper.

And then, suddenly, and as if from the sky came the thought of
Providence, the feeling that she had been led along the beach to find
the wood and to find this. The remembrance of how she had been saved
from the _Gaston de Paris_ rose up in her mind also--saved almost by a
miracle.

To a person torn from civilization and flung into the arms of Nature the
most terrible thing is the sense of the amorphous, the feeling that
there is no structure in this world where houses are not and laws are
not and streets are not, no power to intervene between oneself and
injury, no thread to cling to. The idea of a Providence to such a person
is like brandy.

The girl remembered the words she had spoken that morning to her
companions when she said that one must not think here but work. There
was no use in thinking of the past or the future, of ships coming or
not, they had been taken care of so far and the feeling came to her that
this would be so to the end.

She rose up, put the paper back in the box and the box in her pocket,
then she turned to the cache.

She walked round the mound to a spot where the covering rocks had fallen
away a bit and going down on her knees began pulling them apart and
carrying them off one by one, dumping them a few yards away. Her rings
hindered her and taking them off she put them in the tobacco box and the
box in her pocket. Under the rocks lay a covering of sand, she fetched
the arm of the cross and scraping away at the sand came upon something
hard, it was the end of a barrel. Then she stood up, flushed with her
work and satisfied.

The stores were there, whatever they might be, and with the help of the
two men they would easily be uncovered. The question whether they would
be of any use after all the years they had lain there recurred to her,
but she put it aside. They would soon see.

Then she started back for the caves taking the slat of wood with her as
a trophy. As she went the recollection of the find followed her
agreeably, she di