gloss it over. Just recently she had
seen an equally mysterious door open and admit a human being; and deep
down in her mind, in the place where the dreams were, the one great
fact had explained and justified the other. Life had vanished into the
void, but life had come from there. There was life in the void, and it
was no longer terrible.

Perhaps all religions were born on a day when some woman, seated upon a
rock by the prehistoric sea, looked at her newborn child and recalled
to mind her man who had been slain, thus closing the charm and
imprisoning the idea of a future state.

Emmeline, with the child in her arms, stepped into the little boat and
took her seat in the stern, whilst Dick pushed off. Scarcely had he put
out the sculls than a new passenger arrived. It was Koko. He would
often accompany them to the reef, though, strangely enough, he would
never go there alone of his own accord. He made a circle or two over
them, and then lit on the gunwale in the bow, and perched there, humped
up, and with his long dove-coloured tail feathers presented to the
water.

The oarsman kept close in-shore, and as they rounded the little cape
all gay with wild cocoa-nut the bushes brushed the boat, and the child,
excited by their colour, held out his hands to them. Emmeline
stretched out her hand and broke off a branch; but it was not a branch
of the wild cocoa-nut she had plucked, it was a branch of the
never-wake-up berries. The berries that will cause a man to sleep,
should he eat of them--to sleep and dream, and never wake up again.

"Throw them away!" cried Dick, who remembered.

"I will in a minute," she replied.

She was holding them up before the child, who was laughing and trying
to grasp them. Then she forgot them, and dropped them in the bottom of
the boat, for something had struck the keel with a thud, and the water
was boiling all round.

There was a savage fight going on below. In the breeding season great
battles would take place sometimes in the lagoon, for fish have their
jealousies just like men--love affairs, friendships. The two great
forms could be dimly perceived, one in pursuit of the other, and they
terrified Emmeline, who implored Dick to row on.

They slipped by the pleasant shores that Emmeline had never seen
before, having been sound asleep when they came past them those years
ago.

Just before putting off she had looked back at the beginnings of the
little house under the artu tree, a