"I can only tell you, Packenham, that when I saw her last, five years ago, she was a graceful girl of eighteen, and as full of happiness as a bird is of song. She looks thirty now, and her face is thin and drawn—but I don't say all for love of Taplin."
"That will all wear off by and by," said the skipper confidently.
"Yes," I thought, "and she won't be a widow long."
Next morning Nerida had an hour or two among the prints and muslin in the trade-room, and there was something of the old beauty about her when she sat down to breakfast with us. We were to sail at noon. The leak had been stopped, and Packenham was in high good-humour.
"Nerida," I inquired unthinkingly, "do you know what became of the ALIDA? She never turned up again."
"Yes," she answered; "she is here, at the bottom of the lagoon. Will you come and look at her?"
After breakfast we lowered the dingy, the captain and I pulling. Nerida steered us out to the north end of the lagoon till we reached a spot where the water suddenly deepened. It was, in fact, a deep pool, some three or four hundred feet in diameter, closed in by a continuous wall of coral rock, the top of which, even at low water, would be perhaps two or three fathoms under the surface.
She held up her hands for us to back water, then she gazed over the side into the water.
"Look," she said, "there lies the ALIDA."