May 5TH.—My message to the sea has been heard. Jasper Begg is on Ken's Island. All that this means to me, all that it may mean, I dare not think. A great burden seems lifted from my shoulders. I have found a friend and he is near me.
May 6th.—I have seen Jasper to-night, and he has gone away again. He is not changed, I think. It is the same honest, English face, the same cheery English voice. I have always said that Jasper is one of the handsomest Englishmen I have ever seen. And just as on my own yacht, so here on Ken's Island, the true English gentleman speaks to me. For Jasper is that above all things, one of Nature's gentlemen, whom the rough world will never disguise nor the sea life change. He would be thirty-five years of age now, I remember, but he has not lost his boyish face, and there is the same shy reticence which he never could conquer. He has come here according to his promise. A ship lies in the offing, and he would have me go to it. How little he knows of my true condition in this dreadful place. How may a woman go when a hundred watch her every hour?
May 7th.—Clair-de-Lune, the Frenchman, came to the bungalow very early this morning to tell me of certain things which happened on the island last night. It seems that Jasper is still here, and that the storm has driven away his ship. I do not know whether to be sorry or glad. He cannot help me—he cannot!—and yet a friend is here. I take new courage at that. If a woman can aid a brave man to win her liberty, I am that woman and Jasper is the man. Yesterday I was alone; but to-day I am alone no longer, and a friend is at my side, and he has heard me. His ship will come back, I say. It is an ecstasy to dream like this!
May 10th.—I have spent four anxious days—more anxious, I think, than any in my life. The ship has not returned, and Jasper Begg is still a fugitive in the hills. There are three of his companions with him, and we send them food every day. What will be the end of it all? I am more closely watched than ever since this was known. I fear the worst for my friends, and yet I am powerless to help them.
May 10th (later).—My husband, who has now returned from San Francisco, knows that Jasper is here and speaks of it. I fear these moods of confidence and kindness. "Your friend has come," Edmond says; "but why am I not to know of it? Why is he frightened of me? Why does he skulk like a thief? Let him show himself at this house and state his business; I shall not eat him!" Edmond, I believe, has moments when he tries to persuade himself that he is a good man. They are dangerous moments, if all a man's better instincts are dead and forgotten.
May 11th.—Clair-de-Lune, Edmond tells me, has been sent to the lower reef. I do not ask him why. It was he who helped my friends in the hills. Is it all real or did I dream it? Jasper Begg, the one man who befriended me, left to die as so many have been left on this unpitying shore! It cannot be—it cannot be! All that I had hoped and planned must be forgotten now. And yet there were those who remembered Ruth Bellenden and came here for love of her, as she will remember them, for love's sake.
The drawing-room is a cave whose walls are of jewels.
May 13th.—The alarm bell rang on the island last night and we left in great haste for the shelter. The dreadful mists were already rising fast when I went down through the woods to the beach. The people fled wildly to the lower reef. It is not three months since the sleep-time, and its renewal was unlooked for. To-night I do not think of my own safety, but of those we are leaving on the heights. What is to become of Jasper, my friend—who will help him? I think of Jasper before any other now. Does he, I wonder, so think of me?