t. On feast-days they killed a
little pig and cooked it on hot stones. They bathed together in the
creek; and in the evening they went down to the lagoon and paddled about
in a dugout, with its great outrigger. The sea was deep blue,
wine-coloured at sundown, like the sea of Homeric Greece; but in the
lagoon the colour had an infinite variety, aquamarine and amethyst and
emerald; and the setting sun turned it for a short moment to liquid
gold. Then there was the colour of the coral, brown, white, pink, red,
purple; and the shapes it took were marvellous. It was like a magic
garden, and the hurrying fish were like butterflies. It strangely lacked
reality. Among the coral were pools with a floor of white sand and here,
where the water was dazzling clear, it was very good to bathe. Then,
cool and happy, they wandered back in the gloaming over the soft grass
road to the creek, walking hand in hand, and now the mynah birds filled
the coconut trees with their clamour. And then the night, with that
great, sky shining with gold, that seemed to stretch more widely than
the skies of Europe, and the soft airs that blew gently through the open
hut, the long night again was all too short. She was sixteen and he was
barely twenty. The dawn crept in among the wooden pillars of the hut and
looked at those lovely children sleeping in one another's arms. The sun
hid behind the great tattered leaves of the plantains so that it might
not disturb them, and then, with playful malice, shot a golden ray, like
the outstretched paw of a Persian cat, on their faces. They opened their
sleepy eyes and they smiled to welcome another day. The weeks lengthened
into months, and a year passed. They seemed to love one another as--I
hesitate to say passionately, for passion has in it always a shade of
sadness, a touch of bitterness or anguish, but as whole heartedly, as
simply and naturally as on that first day on which, meeting, they had
recognised that a god was in them."

"If you had asked them I have no doubt that they would have thought it
impossible to suppose their love could ever cease. Do we not know that
the essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity? And yet
perhaps in Red there was already a very little seed, unknown to himself
and unsuspected by the girl, which would in time have grown to
weariness. For one day one of the natives from the cove told them that
some way down the coast at the anchorage was a British whaling-ship."