piness, eternal youth.

As the oarsman pulled the tiny craft towards the beach, neither he nor
the children saw away behind the boat, on the water near the bending
palm tree at the break in the reef, something that for a moment
insulted the day, and was gone. Something like a small triangle of dark
canvas, that rippled through the water and sank from sight; something
that appeared and vanished like an evil thought.

It did not take long to beach the boat. Mr Button tumbled over the side
up to his knees in water, whilst Dick crawled over the bow.

"Catch hould of her the same as I do," cried Paddy, laying hold of the
starboard gunwale; whilst Dick, imitative as a monkey, seized the
gunwale to port. Now then:

"Yeo ho, Chilliman,
Up wid her, up wid her,
Heave O, Chilliman.'

"Lave her be now; she's high enough."

He took Emmeline in his arms and carried her up on the sand. It was
from just here on the sand that you could see the true beauty of the
lagoon. That lake of sea-water forever protected from storm and trouble
by the barrier reef of coral.

Right from where the little clear ripples ran up the strand, it led the
eye to the break in the coral reef where the palm gazed at its own
reflection in the water, and there, beyond the break, one caught a
vision of the great heaving, sparkling sea.

The lagoon, just here, was perhaps more than a third of a mile broad. I
have never measured it, but I. know that, standing by the palm tree on
the reef, flinging up one's arm and shouting to a person on the beach,
the sound took a perceptible time to cross the water: I should say,
perhaps, an almost perceptible time. The distant signal and the distant
call were almost coincident, yet not quite.

Dick, mad with delight at the place in which he found himself, was
running about like a dog just out of the water. Mr Button was
discharging the cargo of the dinghy on the dry, white sand. Emmeline
seated herself with her precious bundle on the sand, and was watching
the operations of her friend, looking at the things around her and
feeling very strange.

For all she knew all this was the ordinary accompaniment of a sea
voyage. Paddy's manner throughout had been set to the one idea, not to
frighten the "childer"; the weather had backed him up. But down in the
heart of her lay the knowledge that all was not as it should be. The
hurried departure from the ship, the fog in which her uncle had
vanished, those things, and ot