"What's that?" asked the other.
"Why, that the vegetation is not tropical, nor, for the matter of that, is the climate. I am more puzzled than I can say; but all the puzzling in the world won't help us. Food we must have, and clothing; the ladies especially are at a serious inconvenience, in having nothing but what they stand up in."
"Personally, of course, I should like to do something of an apparently brave nature—something in the way of a rescue—just to impress Enid," said Mr. Tant thoughtfully. "But I expect that when it comes to the pinch that sort of thing will fall to your share, and I shall have to stand aside and look on. And she admires brave men; she's rather rubbed that point in once or twice."
"I'll promise you that if anything does happen that calls for bravery, you shall have the first chance, Tant," said Gilbert.
"I wasn't exactly suggesting that; there's nothing selfish about me, I hope," retorted Tant.
Presently he leaned back against the trunk of a tree, and fell into an uneasy slumber. Anxiety kept Byfield awake, and presently also urged him to leave the rough little hut, and to set off on a ramble in the moonlight. Pringle, sleeping like a dog with one eye open, stirred and sat up; then, reassured, lay down to sleep again. Gilbert picked his way down the hillside into the wood, hearing more and more distinctly as he moved the murmur of the sea. And most of all now, in the silence of the night, he thought of Bessie—Bessie who had never complained; Bessie who worked hard, even here, for others; Bessie who had been, in her love and her innocence, so shamefully treated. He knew that he had brought ruin upon her, in the sense that she would never accept from him any help in the future, even should it happen that they were rescued from that place. He knew that she must start in some other Arcadia Street that old sordid battle of life he had but interrupted. He remembered bitterly enough how she had avoided him almost completely in this place; he knew that she felt that everyone about her knew now in what way she had lived, and on whose charity; he understood that she raged fiercely within herself at the thought of uncharitable eyes that watched her, and uncharitable lips that whispered about her.
He went down through the wood, and came out upon the shore at the western side of the island. And there, standing startlingly enough in that deserted place, was a woman at the very margin of the sea, her figure showing dark against the moonlit water and the sky. He went forward wonderingly, and yet with a vague feeling in his mind that he knew who it was; and so came to her, and spoke her name.
"Bessie!"
"I couldn't sleep; I came out into the silence and the moonlight; I wanted to think," she said; and in that solemn hour it seemed as though the barrier she had raised between them had gone down again, and could not ever again separate them. She seemed to look at him with the old friendliness; she let her hands rest in his, while they stood together, with only the sea and the moon for company.
"I couldn't sleep—and I too wanted to think," he said. "I wanted to think most about you—about all that I had wanted and longed to do for you—and about all the ruin I have brought upon you. I have remembered all that you said to me on board the yacht—all that I deserved you should say to me."