te, a
bog through which they had driven themselves with a lash of resolution.

Autumn passed on into winter without a change of expression in the
benign face of nature. Christmas day was as hot as if it had come in
midsummer; the natives were as naked, the trees as fully clad. The
curious sun closed his great eye for a few hours in the twenty-four; the
remainder of the time he glared down upon his victims with a malevolence
that knew no bounds. Soft, sweet winds came with the typhoon season,
else the poor whites must have shrivelled and died while nature
revelled. Rain fell often in fitful little bursts of joyousness, but the
hungry earth sipped its moisture through a million greedy lips, eager to
thwart the mischievous sun. Through it all, the chateau gleamed red and
purple and gray against the green mountainside, baked where the sun
could meet its face, cool where the caverns blew upon it with their
rich, damp breath.

The six months were passing away, however, in spite of themselves; ten
weeks were left before the worn, but determined heirs could cast off
their bonds and rush away to other climes. It mattered little whether
they went away rich or poor; they were to go! Go! That was the richest
thing the future held out to them--more precious than the wealth for
which they stayed. Whatever was being done for them in London and
Boston, it was no recompense for the weariness of heart and soul that
they had found in the green island of Japat.

True, they rode and played and swam and romped without restraint, but
beneath all of their abandon there lurked the ever-present pathos of the
jail, the asylum, the detention ward. The blue sky seemed streaked with
the bars of their prison; the green earth clanked as with the sombre
tread of feet crossing flagstones.

Not until the end of January was there a sign of revolt against the
ever-growing, insidious condition of melancholy. As they turned into the
last third of their exile, they found heart to rejoice in the thought
that release was coming nearer and nearer. The end of March! Eight weeks
off! Soon there would be but seven weeks--then six!

And, all this time, the islanders toiled as they had toiled for years;
they reckoned in years, while the strangers cast up Time's account in
weeks and called them years. Each day the brown men worked in the mines,
piling gems into the vaults with a resoluteness that never faltered.
They were the sons of Martha. The rubies of Mandala