"If we could prevail on Macro to think of building a boat, instead of amassing treasure-trove, we might at all events try it. Nova Scotia is but a hundred miles away, he says,——"
"So close?"
"But he seems to think it a risky voyage, and so far we have come across no tools with which to build. You see, they are not things likely to come ashore."
"For myself, I believe I could be quite content to live here," she said again.
"For ever?—Never to get back to the larger life of the world as long as you lived?"
"Ah—that! ... I do not know.... It is a very hollow life after all, that larger life of the world."
"To grow old here," he said thoughtfully, emphasising his points with slowly nodding head. "To be the last one left alive perhaps.... To be all alone, sick, starving, dying slowly in the dark, unable to lift a finger...."
"I would drown myself if it came to that. It sounds horrible.... Perhaps, after all, we had better build the boat and get away."
"But I don't know that we can. I know nothing about boat-building even if I had the tools, and Macro won't turn to it till he has raked through the wreckage, and that will take him about a hundred years. It grows with every storm, you see."
"We must make him."