ave ended the book. The
whole animus that should have put the life into it is gone, or, if it is
not gone, it is so perverted that it is incorrigible. To _my_ mind the
book is a failure."

Rosella did not answer when Trevor ceased speaking, and there was a long
silence. Trevor looked at her anxiously. He had hated to hurt her.
Rosella gazed vaguely at the fire. Then at last the tears filled her
eyes.

"I am sorry, very, very sorry," said Trevor, kindly. "But to have told
you anything but the truth would have done you a wrong--and, then, no
earnest work is altogether wasted. Even though 'Patroclus' is--not what
we expected of it, your effort over it will help you in something else.
You did work hard at it. I saw that. You must have put your whole soul
into it."

"That," said Rosella, speaking half to herself--"that was just the
trouble."

But Trevor did not understand.

HANTU

BY

HENRY MILNER RIDEOUT

Reprinted from _The Atlantic Monthly_ of May, 1906 by permission

THE SCHOONER _Fulmar_ lay in a cove on the coast of Banda. Her sails,
half hoisted, dripped still from an equatorial shower, but, aloft, were
already steaming in the afternoon glare. Dr. Forsythe, captain and
owner, lay curled round his teacup on the cabin roof, watching the
horizon thoughtfully, with eyes like points of glass set in the puckered
bronze of his face. The "Seventh Officer," his only white companion,
watched him respectfully. All the Malays were asleep, stretched prone or
supine under the forward awning. Only Wing Kat stirred in the smother of
his galley below, rattling tin dishes, and repeating, in endless
falsetto sing-song, the Hankow ditty which begins,--

"'Yaou-yaou!' remarked the grasshoppers."

Ashore, the coolies on the nutmeg plantations had already brought out
their mace to dry, and the baskets lay in vermilion patches on the
sun-smitten green, like gouts of arterial blood. White vapors round the
mountain peaks rose tortuously toward the blue; while seaward, rain
still filled the air as with black sand drifting down aslant, through
gaps in which we could descry far off a steel-bright strip of fair
weather that joined sea and sky, cutting under a fairy island so that it
seemed suspended in the air.

"That's a pretty bit of land," said the doctor lazily. "'_Jam medio
apparet fluctu nemorosa Zacynthos_'. It might be, eh?--Humph!--Virgil
and Shakespeare are the only ones who sometimes make poetry endurable.