"If I had some shoes and stockings, and some proper clothes, I believe I could be quite happy here," she said. "That is if one has not also to starve."
"There is no need to starve. The island is over-run with rabbits. There are fish in the lake here if only we could catch them, and out there among the wreckage are all kinds of things—casks of pork and beef, and coffee, and rum, and flour—enough to last us for hundreds of years."
"It is a most excellent retreat."
"If one were sick of the world. But you surely are too young to have arrived at that stage."
"One may be young and yet be sick of one's world.... Sometime I will tell you.... Now, if you please, I will take a few of these things and you will show me your pool and I will wash them——"
"Oh, I'll do all that for you——"
"Not at all. Besides, with your permission and if you will leave me quite alone, I would like also to wash in fresh water. I too shall never feel quite dry until I have done so."
He assisted her down to the other raft, through a break they had long since made in the side for that purpose, and paddled ashore. There he showed her the pool they had set apart for washing, and told her he would come back for her at whatever time she chose.
"In two hours, please," and he went off into the sand-hills.
But his mind stubbornly refused to interest itself in rabbits. He dropped down on the sunny side of a hummock and let his thoughts run on this most surprising addition to their company. What could possibly explain her,—young, beautiful, of undoubted birth and breeding, yet ready to renounce the world, of which her twenty years or so had apparently given her a surfeit, and to welcome the chance of a hermit life?