aptain promptly. And he stretched out his honest
hand to her.

* * * * *

"She's a wonderfully pretty woman," said Packenham, as we walked the
poop later on, and he glanced down through the open skylight to where
she and the child slept peacefully on the cushioned transoms. "How
prettily she speaks English, too. Do you think she was fond of her
husband, or was it merely excitement that made her cry?--native women
are as prone to be as hysterical as our own when under any violent
emotion."

"I can only tell you, Packenham, that when I saw her last, five years
ago, she was a graceful girl of eighteen, and as full of happiness as a
bird is of song. She looks thirty now, and her face is thin and
drawn--but I don't say all for love of Taplin."

"That will all wear off by and by," said the skipper confidently.

"Yes," I thought, "and she won't be a widow long."

* * * * *

Next morning Nerida had an hour or two among the prints and muslin in
the trade-room, and there was something of the old beauty about her
when she sat down to breakfast with us. We were to sail at noon. The
leak had been stopped, and Packenham was in high good-humour.

"Nerida," I inquired unthinkingly, "do you know what became of the
ALIDA? She never turned up again."

"Yes," she answered; "she is here, at the bottom of the lagoon. Will
you come and look at her?"

After breakfast we lowered the dingy, the captain and I pulling. Nerida
steered us out to the north end of the lagoon till we reached a spot
where the water suddenly deepened. It was, in fact, a deep pool, some
three or four hundred feet in diameter, closed in by a continuous wall
of coral rock, the top of which, even at low water, would be perhaps
two or three fathoms under the surface.

She held up her hands for us to back water, then she gazed over the
side into the water.

"Look," she said, "there lies the ALIDA."

* * * * *

We bent over the side of the boat. The waters of the lagoon were as
smooth as glass and as clear. We saw two slender rounded columns that
seemed to shoot up in a slanting direction from out the vague, blue
depths beneath, to within four or five fathoms of the surface of the
water. Swarms of gorgeously-hued fish swam and circled in and about the
masses of scarlet and golden weed that clothed the columns from their
tops downward, and swayed gently to and fro as they glided in and out.

A hawk-bill turtle, huge, black, and misshapen, slid out from beneat