o the awful blackness of the night.
And then the days in the boat with the six survivors! Ah! the memory of
that will chill his blood to his dying day. Men have had to do that
which he and the two who came through alive with him had done.

How long they endured that black agony of suffering he knew not. By
common consent none of them ever spoke of it again.

Three months after they had drifted ashore, a passing sperm whaler,
cruising through the group, took away the two seamen, and then
Brantley, after bidding them a silent farewell, had, with bitter
despair gnawing at his heart, turned his face away from the ship, and
walked back into the palm-shaded village.

* * * * *

"I will never go back again," he had said to himself. And perhaps he
was right; for when the DORIS went to pieces on Tuanake his hope and
fortunes went with her, and, save for that other Doris, there was no
one in the world who cared for him. He was not the man to face the
world again with: "Why, he lost his first ship!" whispered among his
acquaintances.

And this is how Brantley--young, handsome, and as smart a seaman (save
for that one fatal mistake) as ever trod a deck--became Paranili the
PAPALAGI, and was living out his life among the people of solitary
Vahitahi.

* * * * *

Ere a year had passed a trading captain bound to the Gambier Islands
had given him a small stock of trade goods, and the thought of Doris
had been his salvation. Only for her he would have sunk to the life of
a mere idle, gin-drinking, and dissolute beach-comber. As it was, his
steady, straightforward life among the people of the island was a big
factor to his business success. And so every year he sent money to
Doris by some passing whaler or Tahitian trading schooner, but twice
only had he got letters from her; and each time she had said: "Let me
come to you, Fred. We are alone in the world, and may never meet again
else. Sometimes I awake in the night with a sudden fear. Let me come;
my heart is breaking with the loneliness of my life here, so far away
from you."

* * * * *

But two years ago he had done that which would keep Doris from ever
coming to him, he thought. He had married a young native girl--that is,
taken her to wife in the Paumotuan fashion--and surely Doris, with her
old-fashioned notions of right and wrong, would grieve bitterly if she
knew it.

Presently he rose, talking to himself as is the wont of those who have
lived long apart from all w