Truly, Gabriel Jellybrand stood in need of that optimism which accompanies the faith of all Heaven's "little children."
* * * * * *
The steam-yacht pushed off again with the evening tide, leaving Cyprian and Ferlie wandering back from the shore, the coco-nut trees chattering above their heads in the falling breeze. Occasionally she picked up Thu Daw whose legs were not, as yet, quite to be trusted, and would carry him away to the left or to the right, down slight inclines into some cave of dark foliage.
"And is this Heaven?" asked John, following out some private train of thought connected with Jellybrand and the concertina, the owner of which could be heard practising in the distance.
"'Over the fields of glory,' you know, Mother, and 'over the jasper sea'!"
"Not that Heaven, yet," said Ferlie. "This is more like the Garden of Paradise in your Hans Andersen."
"I sometimes wish," said Cyprian, "that you and John were not so inordinately well read."
"Anyway," finished John, after a thoughtful pause, "will I be let sleep in one of them kennels to-night?"
"There! He has said it." Cyprian rounded on Ferlie. "I trust, Ferlie, you are going to permit us the unromantic shelter of the forest bungalow, but I have not really any hope. Of course, if John honestly finds it coincides with his conception of the Simple Life to share the couch of James Snook—but I noticed several holes in the roof of the bungalow which should give primitive colour to the place for our satisfaction and more holes in the floor, which intuition tells me represent the overcrowded tenement lodgings of considerable families of snakes and rats."
"Firstly," said Ferlie, "you are sleeping out of doors. We will sling our hammocks between trees, under the mosquito nets. Secondly, John, you are not so much as to enter a kennel without leave. I don't know whether that elephantiasis is catching. Thirdly, an educated man's intuition should assure him that snakes and rats seldom dwell together in sunny amity."