there, my dear."

"And so I stopped all that dying sickness directly," she continued
comfortably, "because it was too silly, if I could not tell him about
it afterwards, you see.

"And yet he was very cross to me about the bread," she burst out
childishly. "Why do I think he has to be there, Jerry? He cannot talk
to me nearly so nicely as you can--he does not understand. Why must he
be there?"

I choked and laughed at once.

"Because you love him, you silly Margarita!" I declared.

"That must be it," she agreed, with a serious, long look at me out of
those deep-sea coloured eyes.

Ah, me!

How we worked at that canal! Caliban and two swarthy Italians and
Roger and I--for I marked out the course of it in an artfully natural
curve and put in the stakes. There were eighty-odd feet across the
part of the peninsula we selected, and it bade fair to wear us all out
and last forever, till I seized the occasion of a business trip that
took Roger away for four days and hired a great gang of labourers who
finished it all up, so that he walked into his island home across a
foot-bridge, to his great and boyish delight. What a big boy he was,
after all! Not that I did not share his pleasure in the Island: it
gave me a delicious feeling of security and distance from the rest of
the world. With the help of the gang I had been able to widen our
channel considerably and it took a very respectable bridge indeed to
span the gap. We had made plans for a regular drawbridge, but later
we abandoned them, and chopped even the old one down. The water has
washed and washed and worn away since, on the island side, and now one
must be bent upon a swim indeed who cares to venture among the jagged
ledges and mill-races that my blasting made.

We piped our spring too--a beauty--up through the dairy cellar to the
kitchen, and Caliban was saved many a weary trip. Some years afterward
I took my chance during another absence of the lord of the Island, and
a hurried and astonished set of plumbers installed a luxurious
bathroom in either ell of the cottage--a surprise for his birthday.
Profiting by a winter in Bermuda, I copied their roof reservoirs,
allowing one to each ell, sanded without, whitewashed within, an
architectural measure which made the skyline even more rocky and wild,
in appearance, from the water. Before we left, that autumn, we planted
fifty evergreens, pines, hemlocks and spruces, in a broad belt just
opposite the Island, mask