road, or
even bathing in a river, as she appears bathing in the sea?

Some instinct made Dick cover himself up on shore, and strip naked on
the reef. In a minute he was down by the edge of the surf, javelin in
one hand, fish-spear in the other.

Emmeline, by a little pool the bottom of which was covered with
branching coral, sat gazing down into its depths, lost in a reverie
like that into which we fall when gazing at shapes in the fire. She had
sat some time like this when a shout from Dick aroused her. She
started to her feet and gazed to where he was pointing. An amazing
thing was there.

To the east, just rounding the curve of the reef, and scarcely a
quarter of a mile from it, was coming a big topsail schooner; a
beautiful sight she was, heeling to the breeze with every sail drawing,
and the white foam like a feather at her fore-foot.

Dick, with the javelin in his hand, was standing gazing at her; he had
dropped his fishspear, and he stood as motionless as though he were
carved out of stone. Emmeline ran to him and stood beside him; neither
of them spoke a word as the vessel drew closer.

Everything was visible, so close was she now, from the reef points on
the great mainsail, luminous with the sunlight, and white as the wing
of a gull, to the rail of the bulwarks. A crowd of men were hanging
over the port bulwarks gazing at the island and the figures on the
reef. Browned by the sun and sea-breeze, Emmeline's hair blowing on the
wind, and the point of Dick's javelin flashing in the sun, they looked
an ideal pair of savages, seen from the schooner's deck.

"They are going away," said Emmeline, with a long-drawn breath of
relief.

Dick made no reply; he stared at the schooner a moment longer in
silence, then, having made sure that she was standing away from the
land, he began to run up and down, calling out wildly, and beckoning to
the vessel as if to call her back.

A moment later a sound came on the breeze, a faint hail; a flag was run
up to the peak and dipped as in derision, and the vessel continued on
her course.

As a matter of fact, she had been on the point of putting about. Her
captain had for a moment been undecided as to whether the forms on the
reef were those of castaways or savages. But the javelin in Dick's hand
had turned the scale of his opinion in favour of the theory of savages.

CHAPTER VIII

LOVE STEPS IN

Two birds were sitting in the branches of the artu tree: Koko had