"Beast!" he said. "Did you see its eyes? Did you see its eyes? I wish
it had a hundred eyes, and I had a hundred spears to drive into them!"

She was clinging to him, and sobbing and laughing hysterically, and
praising him. One might have thought that he had rescued her from
death, not she him.

The sun had nearly vanished, and he led her back to where the dinghy
was moored, recapturing and putting on his trousers on the road. He
picked up the dead fish he had speared; and as he rowed her back across
the lagoon, he talked and laughed, recounting the incidents of the
fight, taking all the glory of the thing to himself, and seeming quite
to ignore the important part she had played in it.

This was not from any callousness or want of gratitude, but simply from
the fact that for the last five years he had been the be-all and
end-all of their tiny community--the Imperial master. And he would
just as soon have thought of thanking her for handing him the spear as
of thanking his right hand for driving it home. She was quite content,
seeking neither thanks nor praise. Everything she had came from him:
she was his shadow and his slave. He was her sun.

He went over the fight again and again before they lay down to rest,
telling her he had done this and that, and what he would do to the next
beast of the sort. The reiteration was tiresome enough, or would have
been to an outside listener, but to Emmeline it was better than Homer.
People's minds do not improve in an intellectual sense when they are
isolated from the world, even though they are living the wild and happy
lives of savages.

Then Dick lay down in the dried ferns and covered himself with a piece
of the striped flannel which they used for blanketing, and he snored,
and chattered in his sleep like a dog hunting imaginary game, and
Emmeline lay beside him wakeful and thinking. A new terror had come
into her life. She had seen death for the second time, but this time
active and in being.

CHAPTER V

THE SOUND OF A DRUM

The next day Dick was sitting under the shade of the artu. He had the
box of fishhooks beside him, and he was bending a line on to one of
them. There had originally been a couple of dozen hooks, large and
small, in the box; there remained now only six--four small and two
large ones. It was a large one he was fixing to the line, for he
intended going on the morrow to the old place to fetch some bananas,
and on the way to try for a fish in