oon. Dick had been rowing; he had
ceased, and was letting the boat drift for a bit. Emmeline was dancing
the child on her knee, when it suddenly held out its arms to the
oarsman and said:

"Dick!"

The little word, so often heard and easily repeated, was its first word
on earth.

A voice that had never spoken in the world before had spoken; and to
hear his name thus mysteriously uttered by a being he has created is
the sweetest and perhaps the saddest thing a man can ever know.

Dick took the child on his knee, and from that moment his love for it
was more than his love for Emmeline or anything else on earth.

CHAPTER XV

THE LAGOON OF FIRE

Ever since the tragedy of six years ago there had been forming in the
mind of Emmeline Lestrange a something--shall I call it a deep
mistrust? She had never been clever; lessons had saddened and wearied
her, without making her much the wiser. Yet her mind was of that order
into which profound truths come by short-cuts. She was intuitive.

Great knowledge may lurk in the human mind without the owner of the
mind being aware. He or she acts in such or such a way, or thinks in
such and such a manner from intuition; in other words, as the outcome
of the profoundest reasoning.

When we have learnt to call storms, storms, and death, death, and
birth, birth, when we have mastered the sailor's horn-book, and Mr
Piddington's law of cyclones, Ellis's anatomy, and Lewer's midwifery,
we have already made ourself half blind. We have become hypnotized by
words and names. We think in words and names, not in ideas; the
commonplace has triumphed, the true intellect is half crushed.

Storms had burst over the island before this. And what Emmeline
remembered of them might be expressed by an instance.

The morning would be bright and happy, never so bright the sun, or so
balmy the breeze, or so peaceful the blue lagoon; then, with a horrid
suddenness, as if sick with dissimulation and mad to show itself,
something would blacken the sun, and with a yell stretch out a hand and
ravage the island, churn the lagoon into foam, beat down the coconut
trees, and slay the birds. And one bird would be left and another
taken, one tree destroyed and another left standing. The fury of the
thing was less fearful than the blindness of it, and the indifference
of it.

One night, when the child was asleep, just after the last star was lit,
Dick appeared at the doorway of the house. He had been down