shown at Matautu. For that she had grieved and wept and eaten nothing,
and the world was cold and dark to her.

"Poor little devil!" said the trader to himself--"hungry." Then he
opened a locker and found a tin of sardines. Not a scrap of biscuit.
There was plenty of biscuit, though, in the boat, in fifty-pound tins,
but on these mats were spread, where-on his crew were sleeping. He was
about to rouse them when he remembered the old dame's basket of ripe
bread-fruit. He laughed and looked at her. She, too, slept, coiled up
at his feet. But first he opened the sardines and placed them beside
the girl, and motioned her to steer. Her eyes gleamed like diamonds in
the darkness as she answered his glance, and her soft fingers grasped
the tiller. Very quickly, then, he felt among the packages aft till he
came to the basket.

A quick stroke of his knife cut the cinnet that lashed the sides
together. He felt inside. "Only two, after all, but big ones, and no
mistake. Wrapped in cloth, too! I wonder--Hell and Furies! what's
this?"--as his fingers came in contact with something that felt like a
human eye. Drawing his hand quickly back, he fumbled in his pockets for
a match, and struck it. Bread-fruit! No. Two heads with closed eyes and
livid lips blue with the pallor of death, showing their white teeth.
And Salome covered her face and slid down in the bottom of the boat
again, and wept afresh for her cousin and brother, and the boat came up
in the wind, but no one awoke.


* * * * *