"And she?"
The girl paused before replying, and gazed earnestly at me.
"She says she will never marry." And with that she passed out and left me to my meditations.
I must have been fatigued, even bruised and battered by my conflict with sea and shore, as I felt a kind of lassitude creep over me, and presently fell into a dreamless sleep, which lasted till the sun was low and the dimness of the light told me that the day had passed.
I raised myself and saw Miranda sitting on a low stool near the window, or the aperture which served for one. As I turned, she smiled and came towards me, putting out her hand for me to take, and gazing into my face with a frank pleasure of the unspoiled woman of the woods and fields. "I have to thank you for my life," I said, as I pressed her hand warmly. "It is of no great value to any one, as things have been going lately, but being such as it is, you have my warmest gratitude. I should hardly have changed for the worse if I had been lying beside poor Bill Dacre."
"You must not talk in that mocking way," she said, with a pained expression like that of a hurt child. "God has given us all a life to use for some good purpose. Surely you have friends? perhaps a mother and sisters, who would weep when they heard you were lying under the waves?"
"You are right, Miranda, and I will not talk foolishly again; but I thank you with my whole heart for your noble courage in risking your life to save mine. I wonder now how we both got to land, in spite of that beastly undertow?"
"I never could have done it without help," she said. "I was nearly exhausted, yet I did not like to let you go, when Fletcher Quintal and Peter Mills, who had each brought out a man, swam in again, and we came in between them."
"You seem to be quite at home in the water," I said. "I thought I could swim, and at Strong's Island and other places could hold my own with the natives pretty well. But I found my mistake here."
"Of course we all swim well," she replied, smiling, "and know how to manage a boat. It would be curious if we did not; there is little else to do, in Norfolk Island, except when we are working in the fields. Our life is sometimes dull, I must allow."