the lagoon, still dreaming of the
summer night; in the open the fish were jumping busily, sending musical
ripples towards the shore; and in the air hung the magic of
dawn--silent, incommunicable.

I lit the fire, so that an hour later the clergyman should find good
ashes to stir his porridge over, and then set forth upon an examination
of the island, but hardly had I gone a dozen yards when I saw a figure
standing a little in front of me where the sunlight fell in a pool among
the trees.

It was Joan. She had already been up an hour, she told me, and had
bathed before the last stars had left the sky. I saw at once that the
new spirit of this solitary region had entered into her, banishing the
fears of the night, for her face was like the face of a happy denizen of
the wilderness, and her eyes stainless and shining. Her feet were bare,
and drops of dew she had shaken from the branches hung in her
loose-flying hair. Obviously she had come into her own.

"I've been all over the island," she announced laughingly, "and there
are two things wanting."

"You're a good judge, Joan. What are they?"

"There's no animal life, and there's no--water."

"They go together," I said. "Animals don't bother with a rock like this
unless there's a spring on it."

And as she led me from place to place, happy and excited, leaping
adroitly from rock to rock, I was glad to note that my first impressions
were correct. She made no reference to our conversation of the night
before. The new spirit had driven out the old. There was no room in her
heart for fear or anxiety, and Nature had everything her own way.

The island, we found, was some three-quarters of a mile from point to
point, built in a circle, or wide horseshoe, with an opening of twenty
feet at the mouth of the lagoon. Pine-trees grew thickly all over, but
here and there were patches of silver birch, scrub oak, and
considerable colonies of wild raspberry and gooseberry bushes. The two
ends of the horseshoe formed bare slabs of smooth granite running into
the sea and forming dangerous reefs just below the surface, but the rest
of the island rose in a forty-foot ridge and sloped down steeply to the
sea on either side, being nowhere more than a hundred yards wide.

The outer shore-line was much indented with numberless coves and bays
and sandy beaches, with here and there caves and precipitous little
cliffs against which the sea broke in spray and thunder. But the inner
shore,