stones, in that hot, tropical air, would soon restore them again. So he
opened the box and laid them carefully out on a flat white slab of coral.
After that, he had time to consider exactly where they were, and what
their chances in life, if any, might now amount to.

Pitch dark as it was, he had no difficulty in deciding at once by the
general look of things that they had reached a fringing reef, such as he
was already familiar with in the Marquesas and elsewhere. The reef was no
doubt circular, and it enclosed within itself a second or central island,
divided from it by a shallow lagoon of calm, still water. He walked some
yards inland. From where he now stood, on the summit of the ridge, he
could look either way, and by the faint reflected light of the stars, or
the glare of the great pyre that burned on the central island, he could
see down on one side to the ocean, with its fierce white pounding surf,
and on the other to the lagoon, reflecting the stars overhead, and
motionless as a mill-pond. Between them lay the low raised ridge of
coral, covered with tall stems of cocoanut palms, and interspersed here
and there, as far as his eye could judge, with little rectangular clumps
of plantain and taro.

But what alarmed Felix most was the fire that blazed so brightly to
heaven on the central island; for he knew too well that meant--there were
_men_ on the place; the land was inhabited.

The cocoanuts and taro told the same doubtful tale. From the way they
grew, even in that dim starlight, Felix recognized at once they had all
been planted.

Still, he didn't hesitate to do what he thought best for Muriel's relief
for all that. Collecting a few sticks and fragments of palm-branches from