ch imagination one felt afraid in this place, for one felt
not alone. At any moment it seemed that one might be touched on the
elbow by a hand reaching out from the surrounding tangle. Even Dick
felt this, unimaginative and fearless as he was. It took him nearly
three-quarters of an hour to get through, and then, at last, came the
blessed air of real day, and a glimpse of the lagoon between the
tree-boles.

He would have rowed round in the dinghy, only that at low tide the
shallows of the north of the island were a bar to the boat's passage.
Of course he might have rowed all the way round by way of the strand
and reef entrance, but that would have meant a circuit of six miles or
more. When he came between the trees down to the lagoon edge it was
about eleven o'clock in the morning, and the tide was nearly at the
full.

The lagoon just here was like a trough, and the reef was very near,
scarcely a quarter of a mile from the shore. The water did not shelve,
it went down sheer fifty fathoms or more, and one could fish from the
bank just as from a pier head. He had brought some food with him, and
he placed it under a tree whilst he prepared his line, which had a lump
of coral for a sinker. He baited the hook, and whirling the sinker
round in the air sent it flying out a hundred feet from shore. There
was a baby cocoa-nut tree growing just at the edge of the water. He
fastened the end of his line round the narrow stem, in case of
eventualities, and then, holding the line itself, he fished.

He had promised Emmeline to return before sundown.

He was a fisherman. That is to say, a creature with the enduring
patience of a cat, tireless and heedless of time as an oyster. He came
here for sport more than for fish. Large things were to be found in
this part of the lagoon. The last time he had hooked a horror in the
form of a cat-fish; at least in outward appearance it was likest to a
Mississippi cat-fish. Unlike the cat-fish, it was coarse and useless as
food, but it gave good sport.

The tide was now going out, and it was at the going-out of the tide
that the best fishing was to be had. There was no wind, and the lagoon
lay like a sheet of glass, with just a dimple here and there where the
outgoing tide made a swirl in the water.

As he fished he thought of Emmeline and the little house under the
trees. Scarcely one could call it thinking. Pictures passed before his
mind's eye--pleasant and happy pictures, sunlit, moonlit