"You fool!" he answered in a low, shocked voice, "you utter fool. That's
just the way all victims talk. As if you didn't understand just as well as
I do!" he sneered with scorn in his voice, and a sort of resignation. "The
best thing you can do is to keep quiet and try to hold your mind as firm as
possible. This feeble attempt at self-deception only makes the truth harder
when you're forced to meet it."

My little effort was over, and I found nothing more to say, for I knew
quite well his words were true, and that I was the fool, not he. Up to a
certain stage in the adventure he kept ahead of me easily, and I think I
felt annoyed to be out of it, to be thus proved less psychic, less
sensitive than himself to these extraordinary happenings, and half ignorant
all the time of what was going on under my very nose. He knew from the very
beginning, apparently. But at the moment I wholly missed the point of his
words about the necessity of there being a victim, and that we ourselves
were destined to satisfy the want. I dropped all pretence thenceforward,
but thenceforward likewise my fear increased steadily to the climax.

"But you're quite right about one thing," he added, before the subject
passed, "and that is that we're wiser not to talk about it, or even to
think about it, because what one thinks finds expression in words, and what
one says, happens."

That afternoon, while the canoe dried and hardened, we spent trying to
fish, testing the leak, collecting wood, and watching the enormous flood of
rising water. Masses of driftwood swept near our shores sometimes, and we
fished for them with long willow branches. The island grew perceptibly
smaller as the banks were torn away with great gulps and splashes. The
weather kept brilliantly fine till about four o'clock, and then for the
first time for three days the wind showed signs of abating. Clouds began to