Here was
the opportunity of all others to explore it, unhampered by any one,
just Crusoe and I alone, in the fashion that left me freest to
indulge my dreams.

I waited until the Scotchman's back was safely turned, because if
he saw me setting forth on this excursion he was quite certain to
command me to return, and I had no intention of submitting to his
dictatorial ways and yet was not sure how I was successfully to
defy him. I believed him capable of haling me lack by force, while
tears or even swoons left him unmoved. Of course he would take the
absurd ground that the cave was dangerous, in the face of the
glaring fact that a girl who had come to this island solely to
protect Aunt Jane ought certainly to be able to protect herself.
Besides, what right had he to care if I was drowned, anyhow?

But of course I was not going to be.

The retreating tide had left deep pools behind, each a little
cosmos of fairy seaweeds and tiny scuttling crabs and rich and
wonderful forms of life which were strange to me. Crusoe and I
were very much interested, and lingered a good deal on the way.
But at last we reached the great archway, and passed with a
suddenness which was like a plunge into cool water from the hot
glare of the tropic sunshine into the green shadow of the cavern.

At the lower end, between the two arches, a black, water-worn rock
paving rang under one's feet. Further in under the point the floor
of the cave was covered with white sand. All the great shadowy
place was murmuring like a vast sea-shell. Beyond the southern
archway spread the limitless heaving plain of the Pacific. Near at
hand bare black rocks rose from the surges, like skeletons of the
land that the sea had devoured. And after a while these walls that
supported the cavern roof would be nibbled away, and the roof would
fall, and the waves roar victorious over the ruins.

I wished I could visit the place in darkness. It would be thrice
as mysterious, filled with its hollow whispering echoes, as in the
day. I dreamed of it as it might have been when a boat from the
_Bonny Lass_ crept in, and the faint winking eye of a lantern
struck a gleam from the dark waters and showed nothing all around
but blackness, and more blackness.

From the ledge far above my head led off those narrow, teasing
crevices in which the three explorers did their unrewarded
burrowing. I could see the strands of a rope ladder lying coiled
at the edge of the shelf