although it was not now blowing hard, she knew that it was useless for
them to attempt to paddle against it. So, keeping dead before the wind
and sea, they drifted slowly along.

At noon the wind died away, and then, tired and worn out, she and Ruvani
lay down in the bottom of the canoe and slept, while little Tarita sat
up on the cane framework of the outrigger and watched the horizon for
Sralik's boat.

Hour after hour passed, and the two girls still slept. Tarita, too, had
lain her weary head down and slumbered with them.

Slowly the sun sank beneath a sea of glassy smoothness, unrippled even
by the faintest air, and then Ninia awoke, and, sitting up, tossed her
cloud of dark hair away from her face, and looked around her upon the
darkening ocean. Her lips were dry and parched, and she felt a terrible
thirst.

"Tarita," she called, "art sleeping, dear one?"

A sob answered her.

"Nay, for my head is burning, and I want a drink."

*****

The whole story of those days of unutterable agony cannot be told here.
There, under a torrid sun, without a drop of water or a morsel of food,
the poor creatures drifted about till death mercifully came to two of
them.

It was on the evening of the second day that Ninia, taking her little
sister in her own fast weakening arms, pressed her to her bosom, and,
looking into her eyes, felt her thirst-racken body quiver and then grow
still in the strange peacefulness of death. Then a long wailing cry
broke upon the silence of the night.

How long she had sat thus with the child's head upon her bosom and her
dead sightless eyes turned upward to the glory of the star-lit heavens
she knew not; after that one moaning cry of sorrow that escaped from her
anguished heart she had sat there like a figure of stone, dull, dazed,
and unconscious almost of the agonies of thirst. And then Ruvani, with
wild, dreadful eyes and bleeding, sun-baked lips, crept towards her,
and, laying her face on Ninia's hand, muttered--

"Farewell, O friend of my heart; I die."

And then, as she lay there with closed eyes and loosened hair falling
like a shroud over the form of her dead playmate, she muttered and
talked, and then laughed a strange weird laugh that chilled the blood in
Ninia's veins. So that night passed, and then, as the fiery sun uprose
again upon the wide sweep or lonely sea and the solitary drifting canoe
with its load of misery, Ruvani, who still muttered and laughed to
herself, sudden