"But I owe it to you, at least, to tell them now."
"Why to me, especially?"
"For Conetta's sake."
"I'll answer for Conetta."
He sat down on the biscuit box, where he had been sitting when I came awake, and put his back against a tree.
"I'm a wholesale murderer, Dick; that is about what it comes to!" he groaned. "I have brought the woman I'd die for down into this devil's sea to starve her to death. I know you'll say that I meant it all the other way about, and so I did. But in this world it is only results that count. I'm a bloody assassin."
I tried sitting up in the hammock, and found that it could be done. Then I tried standing, and found that this, too, was possible.
"Supposing we go and join the breakfast chase," I suggested, meaning to interpose a saving distraction; and we did it.
This was the beginning of the fourth act—the most disheartening fourth act—in our gladsome little Caribbean comedy which was turning out so tragically. For a day or two we were able to make light of the sudden change of diet, and even of its scantiness, and to extract some sort of forced fun out of the oyster dredging and the crabbing; also, out of our not too successful attempts to vary the menu by fishing, with bent hat-pins for hooks, in the crystal-clear waters of the lagoon. But in a short while the laugh came less readily, and the eyes of some—of the younger women, at least—grew strained from much staring at dazzling, but empty, horizons, and filled easily with tears.