their black faces.

Then he jumped it on its feet and sent it back to its people with a slap
on its behind, and returned to his tent to smoke till Berselius and Meeus
returned.

But he had worked his own undoing, for, till they broke camp, Papeete
haunted him like a buzz-fly, peeping at him, sometimes from under the
tent, trotting after him like a dog, watching him from a distance, till he
began to think of "haunts" and "sendings" and spooks.

When Berselius and his companion returned, the three men sat and smoked
till supper time.

At dark the villagers were driven into their huts and at the door of each
hut lay a sentry.

A big fire was lit, and by its light two more sentries kept watch over the
others and their prisoners. Then the moon rose, spreading silver over the
silence of the pools and the limitless foliage of the forest.

CHAPTER XV

THE PUNISHMENT

The sun rose, bringing with it a breeze. Above the stir and bustle of the
birds you could hear the gentle wind in the tree-tops like the sound of a
sea on a low-tide beach.

The camp was still in gloom, but the whole arc of sky above the pools was
thrilled and filled with living light. Sapphire blue, dazzling and pale,
but deep with infinite distance, it had an intrinsic brilliancy as though
filled with sunbeams brayed to dust.

The palm tops had caught the morning splendour and then, rapidly, as
though the armies of light were moving to imperious trumpet-calls,
charging with golden spears, legion on legion, a hurricane of brightness,
Day broke upon the pools.

We call it Day, but what is it, this splendour that comes from nowhere,
and vanishes to nowhere, that strikes our lives rhythmically like the
golden wing of a vast and flying bird, bearing us along with it in the
wind of its flight?

The rotation of the earth? But in the desert, on the sea, in the spaces of
the forest you will see in the dawn a vision divorced from time, a
recurring glance of a beauty that is eternal, a ray as if from the bright
world toward which the great bird Time is flying, caught and reflected to
our eyes by every lift of the wing.

The dawn had not brought the truants back from the forest.

This point Meeus carefully verified. Even the boy who had been sent to
communicate with them had not returned.

"No news?" said Berselius, as he stepped from his tent-door and glanced
around him.

"None," replied Meeus.

Adams now appeared, and the servants who had be