y knew.
But they dared not speak of it or question each other.

Dick had carried his companion to the hut when he left the boat, and
hidden with her there; the evening had come on, and the night, and now
in the darkness, without having tasted food all day, he was telling her
not to be afraid, that he would take care of her. But not a word of
the thing that had happened.

The thing, for them, had no precedent, and no vocabulary. They had come
across death raw and real, uncooked by religion, undeodorised by the
sayings of sages and poets.

They knew nothing of the philosophy that tells us that death is the
common lot, and the natural sequence to birth, or the religion that
teaches us that Death is the door to Life.

A dead old sailor-man lying like a festering carcass on a coral ledge,
eyes staring and glazed and fixed, a wide-open mouth that once had
spoken comforting words, and now spoke living crabs.

That was the vision before them. They did not philosophise about it;
and though they were filled with terror, I do not think it was terror
that held them from speaking about it, but a vague feeling that what
they had beheld was obscene, unspeakable, and a thing to avoid.

Lestrange had brought them up in his own way. He had told them there
was a good God who looked after the world; determined as far as he
could to exclude demonology and sin and death from their knowledge, he
had rested content with the bald statement that there was a good God
who looked after the world, without explaining fully that the same God
would torture them for ever and ever, should they fail to believe in
Him or keep His commandments.

This knowledge of the Almighty, therefore, was but a half knowledge,
the vaguest abstraction. Had they been brought up, however, in the most
strictly Calvinistic school, this knowledge of Him would have been no
comfort now. Belief in God is no comfort to a frightened child. Teach
him as many parrot-like prayers as you please, and in distress or the
dark of what use are they to him? His cry is for his nurse, or his
mother.

During that dreadful night these two children had no comfort to seek
anywhere in the whole wide universe but in each other. She, in a sense
of his protection, he, in a sense of being her protector. The
manliness in him greater and more beautiful than physical strength,
developed in those dark hours just as a plant under extraordinary
circumstances is hurried into bloom.

Towards dawn