like seventeen than sixteen, with
a restless and daring expression, half a child, half a man, half a
civilised being, half a savage, he had both progressed and retrograded
during the five years of savage life. He sat down beside Emmeline,
flung the canes beside him, tried the edge of the old butcher's knife
with which he had cut them, then, taking one of the canes across his
knee, he began whittling at it.

"What are you making?" asked Emmeline, releasing the bird, which flew
into one of the branches of the artu and rested there, a blue point
amidst the dark green.

"Fish-spear," replied Dick.

Without being taciturn, he rarely wasted words. Life was all business
for him. He would talk to Emmeline, but always in short sentences; and
he had developed the habit of talking to inanimate things, to the
fish-spear he was carving, or the bowl he was fashioning from a
cocoa-nut.

As for Emmeline, even as a child she had never been talkative. There
was something mysterious in her personality, something secretive. Her
mind seemed half submerged in twilight. Though she spoke little, and
though the subject of their conversations was almost entirely material
and relative to their everyday needs, her mind would wander into
abstract fields and the land of chimerae and dreams. What she found
there no one knew--least of all, perhaps, herself.

As for Dick, he would sometimes talk and mutter to himself, as if in a
reverie; but if you caught the words, you would find that they referred
to no abstraction, but to some trifle he had on hand. He seemed
entirely bound up in the moment, and to have forgotten the past as
completely as though it had never been.

Yet he had his contemplative moods. He would lie with his face over a
rock-pool by the hour, watching the strange forms of life to be seen
there, or sit in the woods motionless as a stone, watching the birds
and the swift-slipping lizards. The birds came so close that he could
easily have knocked them over, but he never hurt one or interfered in
any way with the wild life of the woods.

The island, the lagoon, and the reef were for him the three volumes of
a great picture book, as they were for Emmeline, though in a different
manner. The colour and the beauty of it all fed some mysterious want in
her soul. Her life was a long reverie, a beautiful vision--troubled
with shadows. Across all the blue and coloured spaces that meant months
and years she could still see as in a glass d