Beds too he made with some old sail-cloth fitted to rough frames, and a table, and their furnishing sufficed, though he promised to add to it during the winter.
The Girl's arm was well again, though he still urged caution in the use of it, and kept a watchful eye on it and her; and never had he felt himself so full of the joy and strength of life. When the house was finished, they brought over a supply of stores and lived in it for a time, and turned the waning autumn days to account by long ramblings all over the island, in anticipation of the days when ill weather might coop them strictly within narrower bounds.
There were no discoveries to make in land or sea or sky, scarcely any in themselves. He felt assured in his own mind that she was not unaware of all that he felt for her. The fact, the great undeniable fact, that she did not seem to resent it, was a deep joy to him.
Their good-comradeship had known no cloud. She was as charmingly frank and gracious as ever. She talked away without reserve or constraint of that strange past life of hers, which, in every smallest particular, was so absolutely the opposite of this one. And never once did she display any hankering after Egypt, rather seemed to regard this as the Promised Land, or at all events the doorway to it.
Ever and again the possibilities of rescue or escape came to the front in their discussions, but grew less and less as the weeks went by. He had been seven months on the island, and she four, and save herself, in all that time no other living soul had come to it,—unless, as the mate had so strenuously held, the bodies of those discomforting sea-birds were occupied by the souls of drowned sailor men.
"And you, you know, were a miracle," he would remind her. "The chances against you were about a thousand to one——"
"And you were that one."
"It was not that I was thinking of——"
"I never forget it."
"This place is undoubtedly shunned, as Macro said. It is known as a death-trap. No ship comes here except in pieces. No man comes until he is dead. And so, our prospects of rescue or escape are very small, I fear. For your sake I wish it were otherwise."