no human blood; eat no human
flesh. Those who do will be punished when another fire-canoe comes from
the far land to bring my messengers."

The King of Fire bent low at the words. "Oh, Tu-Kila-Kila," he said, "it
shall be done as you say. Till your messengers come, every man shall live
at peace with all his neighbors."

They stepped into the gig. Mali and Toko followed before M. Peyron as
naturally as they had always followed their masters on the island before.

"Who are these?" the captain asked, smiling.

"Our Shadows," Felix answered. "Let them come. I will pay their passage
when I reach San Francisco. They have been very faithful to us, and they
are afraid to remain, lest the islanders should kill them for letting us
go or for not accompanying us."

"Very well," the captain answered. "Forward all, there, boys! Now, ahead
for the ship. And thank God, we're well out of it!"

But the islanders still stood on the shore and wept, stretching their
hands in vain after the departing boat, and crying aloud in piteous
tones, "Oh, my father, return! Oh, my mother, come back! Oh, very great
gods, do not fly and desert us!"

Seven weeks later Mr. and Mrs. Felix Thurstan, who had been married in
the cathedral at Honolulu the very morning the Australasian arrived
there, sat in an eminently respectable drawing-room in a London square,
where Mrs. Ellis, Muriel's aunt by marriage, was acting as their hostess.

"But how dreadful it is to think, dear," Mrs. Ellis remarked for the
twentieth time since their arrival, with a deep-drawn sigh, "how dreadful
to think that you and Felix should have been all those months alone on
the island together without being married!"

Muriel looked up with a quiet smile toward Felix. "I think, Aunt Mary,"
she said, dreamily, "if you'd been there yourself, and suffered all those
fears, and passed through all those horrors that we did together, you'd
have troubled your head very little indeed about such conventionalities,
as whether or not you happened to be married.... Besides," she added,
after a pause, with a fine perception of the inexorable stringency of
Mrs. Grundy's law, "we weren't quite without chaperons, either, don't you
know; for our Shadows, of course, were always with us."

Whereat Felix smiled an equally quiet smile. "And terrible as it all
was," he put in, "I shall never regret it, because it made Muriel know
how profoundly I loved her, and it made me know how brave and trustful