nd as well! And it's a heavy
squall, too," and she pointed to a moving, inky mass that half
concealed the black shadow of the island. "Quick, take my mat; one end
of it is tight and will hold water."

"Langton, La-a-ngton! Here's a rain squall coming!" and Enderby pressed
the woman's hand to his lips and kissed it again and again. Then with
eager hands he took the mat from her, and staggering forward to the
bows stretched the sound end across and bellied it down. And then the
moving mass that was once black, and was now white, swept down upon
them, and brought them life and joy.

Langton, with an empty beef-tin in his hand, stumbled over his wife's
figure, plunged the vessel into the water and drank again and again.

"Curse you, you brute!" shouted Enderby through the wild noise of the
hissing rain, "where is your wife? Are you going to let her lie there
without a drink?"

Langton answered not, but drank once more. Then Enderby, with an oath,
tore the tin from his hand, filled it and took it to her, holding her
up while she drank. And as her eyes looked gratefully into his while he
placed her tenderly back in the stern-sheets, the madness of a moment
overpowered him, and he kissed her on the lips.

Concerned only with the nectar in the mat, Langton took no regard of
Enderby as he opened the little locker, pulled out a coarse dungaree
jumper, and wrapped it round the thinly-clad and drenched figure of the
woman.

She was weeping now, partly from the joy of knowing that she was not to
die of the agonies of thirst in an open boat in mid-Pacific, and partly
because the water had given her strength to remember that Langton had
cursed her when he had stumbled over her to get at the water in the
mat.

* * * * *

She had married him because of his handsome face and dashing manner for
one reason, and because her pious Scotch father, also a Sydney-Tahitian
trading captain, had pointed out to her that Langton had made and was
still making money in the island trade. Her ideal of a happy life was
to have her husband leave the sea and buy an estate either in Tahiti or
Chili. She knew both countries well: the first was her birthplace, and
between there and Valparaiso and Sydney her money-grubbing old father
had traded for years, always carrying with him his one daughter, whose
beauty the old man regarded as a "vara vain thing," but likely to
procure him a "weel-to-do mon" for a son-in-law.

Mrs Langton cared for her husban