s the islands over a
blue-green sea.

They had made a fire on the night before and had cooked some of the
mussels in the baling tin, the rest had been put by to cook for
breakfast; hot food of any sort is a revelation if you have been
condemned to live on cold stuff for any time, but this morning there was
to be nothing hot. The firewood, one of the bottom boards of the boat
chopped up, had been left out in the rain. The sight of it, all soaked,
made the girl forget her bare feet and her hair roughly tied up in a
knot. The housekeeper that lives in every woman rose up in revolt, all
the more so as the guilty ones tried to defend themselves.

"As for me," said La Touche, "I was listening to the rain, it drove
everything else out of my head."

"That is so," said Bompard, "I thought every moment we would be flooded
out. It was no time for a man to be thinking of firewood."

"Well, you will have no fire and nothing hot," said Cleo, "and those
mussels will be wasted--they won't keep, but there's no use in saying
any more about it--only you must learn to think of things. It's not
pleasant, I know, to have to look ahead but one has to do it. You see I
am not wearing my boots and stockings, boots wear out and stockings wear
out quicker, so I just looked ahead last night and said to myself--'your
stockings will soon be worn into holes, so you must begin now to learn
to do without them.' It's not pleasant, but it has to be done. If that
ship we ran into had looked ahead we would not have been wrecked."

"That is true," said Bompard, anxious to get off the main subject. "If
those chaps had eyes in their heads they wouldn't be feeding the
fishes."

"It wasn't all their fault," put in La Touche. "If those chaps on the
bridge hadn't put the engines on we wouldn't have rammed her as we did."

"Well," said Cleo, "there is no use in going back over things. We have
to get breakfast and then go and open the cache."

She had told them of the cache overnight and, to her wonder, the thing
had interested them, so this morning when they had finished their
biscuits and beef she found not the slightest difficulty in making them
start.

She put on her boots for the journey and then they reeled along the
beach in the usual order, Cleo first, the two others following; the
great skull made them halt and discuss it for a moment but the
figure-head when they reached it held them entirely in its spell.

She could scarcely tear them away, th