ssibly he joined his own
tribe--the men who attacked us." He did not know why he had said it,
for he did not believe it.

The girl looked at him wide eyed for a moment.

"No!" she exclaimed vehemently, much too vehemently he thought. "It
could not be. They were savages."

Clayton looked puzzled.

"He is a strange, half-savage creature of the jungle, Miss Porter. We
know nothing of him. He neither speaks nor understands any European
tongue--and his ornaments and weapons are those of the West Coast
savages."

Clayton was speaking rapidly.

"There are no other human beings than savages within hundreds of miles,
Miss Porter. He must belong to the tribes which attacked us, or to
some other equally savage--he may even be a cannibal."

Jane blanched.

"I will not believe it," she half whispered. "It is not true. You
shall see," she said, addressing Clayton, "that he will come back and
that he will prove that you are wrong. You do not know him as I do. I
tell you that he is a gentleman."

Clayton was a generous and chivalrous man, but something in the girl's
breathless defense of the forest man stirred him to unreasoning
jealousy, so that for the instant he forgot all that they owed to this
wild demi-god, and he answered her with a half sneer upon his lip.

"Possibly you are right, Miss Porter," he said, "but I do not think
that any of us need worry about our carrion-eating acquaintance. The
chances are that he is some half-demented castaway who will forget us
more quickly, but no more surely, than we shall forget him. He is only
a beast of the jungle, Miss Porter."

The girl did not answer, but she felt her heart shrivel within her.

She knew that Clayton spoke merely what he thought, and for the first
time she began to analyze the structure which supported her newfound
love, and to subject its object to a critical examination.

Slowly she turned and walked back to the cabin. She tried to imagine
her wood-god by her side in the saloon of an ocean liner. She saw him
eating with his hands, tearing his food like a beast of prey, and
wiping his greasy fingers upon his thighs. She shuddered.

She saw him as she introduced him to her friends--uncouth,
illiterate--a boor; and the girl winced.

She had reached her room now, and as she sat upon the edge of her bed
of ferns and grasses, with one hand resting upon her rising and falling
bosom, she felt the hard outlines of the man's locket.

She drew i