e sunk for Lady Tennys in the rear of her apartment; a
kitchen and cold-storage cellar were to grow off the west end of the
temple and a splendid awning was to be ordered for the front porch! Time
and patience were to give them all of these changes. Time was of less
consequence than patience, it may be well to add. The slaving retinue
was willing but ignorant.

The adoring chief gave Tennys a group of ten handmaidens before the day
was over, and Hugh had a constant body guard of twenty stalwarts--which
he prosaically turned into carpenters, stone-masons, errand boys
and hunters.

"You must not try to civilize them in a day," she smilingly protested
when he became particularly enthusiastic.

"Well, just see what we have done to-day," he cried. "How can you
account for the enforced abdication of old Uncle Rocksy, the
transformation of his palace into a commodious, three-room
lodging-house, and all such things, unless you admit that we are here to
do as we please? We'll make a metropolitan place out of this hamlet in
a year if we--"

"A year! Oh, don't suggest such a possibility," she cried. "I'd die if I
thought we were to be here for a year."

"I hope we won't, but we may as well look the situation straight in the
face. There has been no white man here before us. It is by the rarest
chance in the world that we are here. Therefore, it may be years before
we are found and taken away from this undiscovered paradise."

The flickering, fitful light of the torches stuck in the ground behind
them played upon two white faces from which had fled the zeal and fervor
of the moment before, leaving then drawn and dispirited.

"All our lives, perhaps," she murmured.

"With these savages as our only companions, worse than death a thousand
times," he groaned, starting to his feet with the vehemence of new
despair. "Could anything be worse than the existence that lies
before us?"

"Yes," she cried, arising, throwing back her shoulders and arms, lifting
her face and breathing long draughts of the cool, pure air. "Yes! The
existence that lies behind is worse than the one ahead. No life can be
worse than the one from which I have escaped. Welcome, eternal solitude!
Farewell, ambition, heart-pangs and the vain mockery of womanhood! To be
free is heaven, no matter what the cost, Hugh."

"Do you mean that you would rather live here forever than go back to
the old life?"

"If I must stay here to be free, I am willing to live in th