of diamonds.

Niabon and Lucia, I must mention, had insisted on standing watch ever
since we had left Apamama, and they certainly helped us a lot, for both
could now steer very well, and took pleasure in it. The former, with
Tepi, was in my watch, the latter was with Tematau, who, like all
Eastern Polynesians, was a good sailor-man and could always be relied
upon.

We had now sailed over a thousand miles; and every day--every hour I
gained more confidence in myself, and the resolution to make one of the
greatest boat voyages across the Pacific had been ever strengthening
in my mind since the day I looked at Chart No. 780 in Krause's house at
Taritai.

What could I not do with such a boat and two such men as Tepi and
Tematau, after we had landed Lucia and Niabon at Guam in the for north!
We would refit the boat, and then turn our faces south once more, and
sail back through the Western Carolines on to wild New Guinea--Dutch New
Guinea, and run along the coast till we came to one of the few scattered
Dutch settlements on the shores of that _terra incognita_. Tepi and
Tematau would stick to me--they had sworn to do so--had told me so in
whispers one bright night, as we three kept watch together and Lucia and
Niabon slept.

Niabon! What a strange strange girl she was! I should find it hard to
say goodbye to her, I thought; and then I felt my cheeks flush.

Say goodbye to her--part from her! Why should we part? Was I so much her
superior that I need be ashamed of asking her to be my wife? What was
I, anyway, but a broken man--a man whose father, my sole remaining
relative, had nearly twenty years before told me with savage contempt
that I had neither brains, energy, nor courage enough to make my way in
the world, thrown me a cheque for a hundred pounds, and sneeringly told
me to get it cashed at once, else he might repent of having given it
to me to squander among the loose people with whom I so constantly
associated. And I had never seen or heard from him, and never would. But
I had that cheque still, for there always was in me a latent affection
for the cold-faced, unsympathetic man who had broken my mother's heart,
not by open unkindness, but by what the head gardener whisperingly told
me (when she was lying dead, and I, sent for from college to attend the
funeral, went to his cottage to see him) was "silent, inwisible neglect,
Master James; silent, inwisible neglect. That's wot killed her." For
the servants loved m