the intuitive process and
acknowledge that John Silence, owing to his peculiar faculties, and the
girl, owing to her singularly receptive temperament, might each in a
different way have divined this latent quality in his soul, and feared
its manifestation later.

On looking back to this painful adventure, too, it now seems equally
natural that the same process, carried to its logical conclusion, should
have wakened some deep instinct in me that, wholly without direction
from my will, set itself sharply and persistently upon the watch from
that very moment. Thenceforward the personality of Sangree was never
far from my thoughts, and I was for ever analysing and searching for the
explanation that took so long in coming.

"I declare, Hubbard, you're tanned like an aboriginal, and you look like
one, too," laughed Maloney.

"And I can return the compliment," was my reply, as we all gathered
round a brew of tea to exchange news and compare notes.

And later, at supper, it amused me to observe that the distinguished
tutor, once clergyman, did not eat his food quite as "nicely" as he did
at home--he devoured it; that Mrs. Maloney ate more, and, to say the
least, with less delay, than was her custom in the select atmosphere of
her English dining-room; and that while Joan attacked her tin plateful
with genuine avidity, Sangree, the Canadian, bit and gnawed at his,
laughing and talking and complimenting the cook all the while, and
making me think with secret amusement of a starved animal at its first
meal. While, from their remarks about myself, I judged that I had
changed and grown wild as much as the rest of them.

In this and in a hundred other little ways the change showed, ways
difficult to define in detail, but all proving--not the coarsening
effect of leading the primitive life, but, let us say, the more direct
and unvarnished methods that became prevalent. For all day long we were
in the bath of the elements--wind, water, sun--and just as the body
became insensible to cold and shed unnecessary clothing, the mind grew
straightforward and shed many of the disguises required by the
conventions of civilisation.

And in each, according to temperament and character, there stirred the
life-instincts that were natural, untamed, and, in a sense--savage.

III

So it came about that I stayed with our island party, putting off my
second exploring trip from day to day, and I think that this far-fetched
instinct to watch Sa