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"There are no parrots on this island," replied Miss Etherington gently.

"When we got away from here," continued the imaginative Mr Gale, "we could take the little troupe with us, and earn an honest living on the music-hall stage. I once saw some performing seals at the Palace. I should think performing turtles would get quite as big a salary; and then when the public got tired of them we could sell them to the Lord Mayor for soup. That is what is known in commercial circles as a by-product."

"Quite true, but you haven't grasped the principle of what I am driving at. Here we are, living on a desert island, and so far we haven't done anything that two people couldn't He ran on, and Miss Etherhave accomplished by going ington watched him stealthily for a picnic up the Thames. through her lashes. A man I even shave. We eat food and woman, however antipout of tins; we do a little athetic, cannot consort tobathing and fishing in the gether upon an uninhabited morning, and play golf in the island for three months withafternoon, and sit about in the out gaining some insight into evening and say how jolly it one another's characters and must be in Town just now. It motives. Miss Etherington seems to me that we are out knew the meaning of this perof the picture somehow. We formance. Mr Gale suspected ought to be a little more primi- her of low spirits, and was tive-barbario. Do you follow endeavouring to cheer her up. me?" He was not doing it very well; but after all, good intentions count for something, and Miss Etherington felt grateful, despite herself. She continued to watch him furtively. He was a presentable youth. He sat beside her, healthy, cleancut, and bronzed, wearing a ragged flannel shirt and an old pair of duck trousers. His hands were clapsed about his knees; his eyes were fixed on vacancy; and his tongue wagged unceasingly. A harebrained and occasionally bumptious young man, but a man for all that.

"No," said Miss Etherington. "In my opinion really nice people continue to behave just as nicely on a desert island as on a yacht."

"But don't you think," continued Mr Gale perseveringly, "that we might train two goats to play bridge with us, or teach a turtle to sing, or something? Then we should feel that we were getting back to Nature-quite biblical, in fact. The voice of the turtle is heard in the land,' and so forth."

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"If you are going to talk nonsense," said Miss Etherington, "I think I will go and get dinner ready."

Suddenly Gale inquired

"I say, what do you think of me now? Has your opinion

of me altered at all, after three self then. Do you forgive me? months of me neat?" You will, won't you?'

The next moment he repented of his inquiry. He had firmly resolved never to embarrass the girl in this fashion so long as they remained on the island together. Now he had broken his word to himself. Miss Etherington's rippling mane had been a little too much for his fortitude.

But the girl did not appear offended. She replied quite simply

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"Yes, I have. Ithink you have behaved very courageously in the face of all our difficulties-' "Self-preservation is the first- began Gale awkwardly.

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"And I have to thank you for a good deal as well," continued Miss Etherington, with slightly heightened colour. "Besides saving my life-you did, you know: that was your life-jacket I was wearing that morning - you have behaved very courteously and honourably to me ever since we found ourselves here, and I am grateful."

This was well spoken. Mr Gale was silent for a moment. Then he inquired

"You did not expect such behaviour from me?"

"I-I never doubted you after the first few hours," said Miss Etherington in a low voice. "I was not quite my.

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Their eyes met. Mr Gale's suddenly blazed.

"When you look at me and talk to me like that," he almost shouted, "I could - Ahem! Ha! H'm! Quite so! My error!"

Miss Etherington's cheeks were crimson.

"I think I will take a sedative scramble up Point Garry," he concluded lamely.

"Perhaps it would be as well," agreed Miss Etherington. "Don't be late for dinner.'

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Mr Gale turned to go, and then paused.

"You don't ask me," he remarked in a slightly injured voice, "whether my opinion of you has changed at all."

"No," replied Miss Etherington. "There is no need."

"I wonder what in thunder she meant by that," mused the harassed Mr Gale, as he scrambled up Point Garry. "Heaven help a man left alone on a desert island with a girl! And I actually thought it would make things easier! Flint axe, and all that. Why don't IHallo, hallo, hallo! Steady, my boy! Is wisions about?"

He had reached the summit of the bluff. There, two miles to the northward, slipping gently over the rollers under easy sail, he beheld a ship-a three-masted schooner.

For a castaway, hungering for a re-entry into civilisation, Mr Gale's subsequent behaviour was peculiar.

VI.

He began by staring stockishly at the passing vehicle of deliverance, evidently the prey of conflicting impulses.

Beside him lay a neatly piled heap of firewood, collected for such crises as this. His eye fell thereon. He regarded it absently, and then raised his eyes to the schooner, which went about and began to slant towards the island.

Mr Gale, instead of shouting or semaphoring, dropped suddenly to his knees and crept furtively back whence he came, until he arrived at the edge of the little plateau, to a position which commanded their cave and encampment. Miss Etherington, from whose eyes the schooner was screened by the intervening bulk of Point Garry, was diligently preparing dinner. Mr Gale gazed down upon her long

Her sleeves

and intently. were rolled up for culinary duties, and her arms looked very round and white. Snatches of a song she was singing floated upwards to his ears. Mr Gale's pulse quickened; his purpose hardened; his conscience died within him. "I can't do it," he muttered "I can't !" A box of matches dropped from his nerveless fingers.

Presently he crawled upon his hands and knees-he would not even risk the exposure of his figure against the sky-line now-to a position from which he could see the schooner. The breeze had freshened; she had gone about again, and was bowling away from the island.

An hour later they met for their evening meal. With characteristic fidelity to the customs of their order, they invariably dressed for dinnerthat is to say, Miss Etherington put on shoes and stockings and changed from her cricket-shirt to a silk blouse, while Mr Gale attired himself in a suit of comparatively white drill which had once been the property of the chief steward of the yacht.

VII.

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not give him the sole right to her society. He had robbed her of her birthright that afternoon: he had deliberately cut her off from a return to the great world and all it held for her.

He had behaved like a cad, he felt, and being an honourable young man, he was filled with a desire to make confession.

"You are not very amusing to-night," remarked Miss Etherington suddenly.

For purposes of playful badinage, there was a tacit understanding between them that everything which went wrong on the island. from cyclones to a fit of the dumps

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was Leslie Gale's fault; and that long-suffering young man was growing accustomed to being treated as something

between a sinful little schoolboy and a rather incompetent court jester.

"Am I to sparkle?" he inquired meekly. "Yes."

"I don't feel quite up to it." "Well, flicker, anyhow!" urged Miss Etherington.

Mr Gale reflected, and replied

"I can't do it to-night. That moon makes me humpy. Look at it! What a whopper!"

Both sat silently surveying the great silvery disc which hung above them, turning their little cove, with its yellow sand and green-clad rocks, into an etching in black and white. There was a long silence, broken by a tremulous sigh from Miss Etherington. Evidently the moon was beginning to exercise its usual pernicious influence. "To-night's Great Thought -what is it?" inquired Mr Gale encouragingly.

"I was thinking," said Miss Etherington dreamily, "what a good thing it would be if all the people who disliked one another for no reason at all could be dropped down together upon an island like this for a month or two."

Mr Gale, knowing full well that a woman never embarks upon a general statement without intending it to have a personal application, carefully turned this sentiment over in his mind.

Then suddenly he glowed duskily.

"You mean," he said unsteadily, "that most people improve on acquaintance."

"Yes," said Miss Etherington deliberately—“I do.”

There was a pause. Then Gale continued—

"Even-people like me?" Miss Etherington nodded. "Even people like you," she said, 66 And," she added unexpectedly, "even people like me."

Mr Gale glanced at her, then stirred in his seat and took a mighty breath of resolution.

"You could never be improved upon by any acquaintance, however long.

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Then he heaved a great sigh of relief. An Englishman does not say these things easily- that is, when he means them.

Miss Etherington subjected her companion to a fleeting but adequate scrutiny, and saw that he was once more at her mercy. But she felt no desire to wither him up-to annihilate the flank thus rashly exposed. Three months of life in the open had entirely cured her of conceit and

petty meanness. Still they had not eradicated in her the natural predilection of a woman for dallying with the fish upon the hook.

"I wonder if you mean that," she remarked in a voice which, though in form severe, in substance invited further folly on the part of Mr Gale.

"Yes, I do mean it," he replied, without heat or passion. "But I am not going to pursue the subject, because I have no right. I have just done you a serious wrong. I want to make confession."

He turned to her, like 8 penitent to a shrine.

"This evening," he said, "when I climbed to Point Garry on my usual excursion, I saw a ship."

Miss Etherington started, but made no further sign.

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"She was quite close, tinued Gale, "and I could have caught her attention by signalling. But I didn't! I let her go! There!"

He stood motionless at her feet, awaiting sentence. Miss Etherington raised her clear gray eyes to his. "Why did you let the ship go?" she asked.

"Because I love you so," said Gale simply. "I could not bear to be parted from you, as I knew I should be. It seemed too cruel to bring this life to an end, just as

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"Just as what?" asked the girl quickly.

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VIII.

They sat on in the moonlight-and on, and on, and on. About half-past ten Mr Gale had respectfully but firmly taken Miss Etherington's hand. Miss Etherington had made a half-hearted attempt to withdraw it. Mr Gale had apologetically but pertinaciously held on. After that they began to talk, and although they had not been out of one another's company for the best part of three months, not one of the many topics with which they had whiled away that lengthy period intruded itself into the conversation. They seemed to have turned over a new page in the book of life together. Under their eyes it lay, fair, blank, and gleaming with blessed possibilities beneath the rays of a tropical moon. And for the moment

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