inety per cent of his pay went into his share of the pool.

Within another year the requisite sum which this pair of canny prudent
souls had set as their modest goal would be reached; and then he could
bid an everlasting farewell to these hated islands and go sailing
home--home to South New Medford and to Miss Hetty Stowe. And then she
would surrender the place she had held for so long as the teacher of
District School Number Four, to become Mrs. Ethan Allen Pratt, a wife
honoured, a helpmate well-beloved.

So to him the coming of the steamer meant more than an orgy of drunken
beachcombers and a bustle of life and activity upon the beach; it meant
more than a thin-strained taste of contact with a distant world of white
men and white men's ways; meant more, even, than letters and papers. To
him it was a renewal of the nearing prospect of an eternal departure out
of these lands. By the steamer's movements he marked off into spaced
intervals the remaining period of his exile, he thought of the passage
of time not in terms of days or weeks but in terms of two-month
stretches. Six visits more of the ship, or possibly seven, and this
drear life would come to an end and another life, the one of his hopes
and plans, would begin.

For its next time of coming the boat was due on or about August the
first. She failed to come on the first, but on the second, early in the
morning, she came nosing into the lagoon. In a canoe with a brown man to
paddle him Pratt put off for her. He was alongside by the time her
anchor chains had rattled out, and the skipper with his own hands passed
down to him a mail bag. He brought it ashore and from it took out his
packet of letters and his sheaf of _Daily Republicans_. These he carried
to his quarters.

First he read the letters, finding them many fewer in number than was
usual. By his private system of chronological accounting there should
have been one letter for every day from the eighteenth of March well on
into May. But here were but a scant dozen instead of the expected
fifty-odd. On the other hand there seemed to be a fairly complete file
of the papers, except that about ten or twelve of the earlier-dated
numbers were missing. By some freakishness in the handling of the post
at this port or that a batch of the older papers and a larger batch of
the newer letters had failed of ultimate delivery to the steamer; so he
figured it. This thing had happened before, causing a vexatious break in