aps they're angry with us for
having caused this storm, as they think, by our foolish action. I believe
they all set it down to our having unluckily eaten that unfortunate
fruit. I'll go out to the door myself and speak to them."

Muriel clung to his arm with a passionate clinging.

"Oh, Felix," she cried, "no! Don't leave me here alone. My darling, I
love you. You're all the world there is left to me now, Felix. Don't go
out to those wretches and leave me here alone. They'll murder you!
they'll murder you! Don't go out, I implore you. If they mean to kill us,
let them kill us both together, in one another's arms. Oh, Felix, I am
yours, and you are mine, my darling!"

It was the first time either of them had acknowledged the fact; but
there, before the face of that awful convulsion of nature, all the little
deceptions and veils of life seemed rent asunder forever as by a flash of
lightning. They stood face to face with each other's souls, and forgot
all else in the agony of the moment. Felix clasped the trembling girl in
his arms like a lover. The two Shadows looked on and shook with silent
terror. If the King of the Rain thus embraced the Queen of the Clouds
before their very eyes, amid so awful a storm, what unspeakable effects
might not follow at once from it! But they had too much respect for those
supernatural creatures to attempt to interfere with their action at such
a moment. They accepted their masters almost as passively as they
accepted the wind and the thunder, which they believed to arise from
them.

Felix laid his poor Muriel tenderly down on the mud floor again. "I
_must_ go out, my child," he said. "For the very love of _you_, I must
play the man, and find out what these savages mean by their drumming."

He crept to the door of the hut (for no man could walk upright before
that awful storm), and peered out into the darkness once more, awaiting
one of the frequent flashes of lightning. He had not long to wait. In a
moment the sky was all ablaze again from end to end, and continued so
for many seconds consecutively. By the light of the continuous zigzags
of fire, Felix could see for himself that hundreds and hundreds of
natives--men, women, and children, naked, or nearly so, with their hair
loose and wet about their cheeks--lay flat on their faces, many courses
deep, just outside the taboo line. The wind swept over them with
extraordinary force, and the tropical rain descended in great floods upon
the