e your time last, Queenie, people give you plenty of present."

"While my time last?" Muriel repeated, with a curious sense of discomfort
creeping over her slowly.

The girl nodded an easy assent. "Yes, while your time last," she
answered, laying a small bundle of palm-leaves at Muriel's back by way of
a cushion. "For now you Korong. By and by, Korong pass to somebody else.
This year, you Korong. So people worship you."

But nothing that Muriel could say would induce the girl further to
explain her meaning. She shook her head and looked very wise. "When a god
come into somebody," she said, nodding toward Muriel in a mysterious way,
"then him god himself; him Korong. When the god go away from him, him
Korong no longer; somebody else Korong. Queenie Korong now; so people
worship him. While him time last, people plenty kind to him."

The day passed away, and night came on. As it approached, heavy clouds
drifted up from eastward. Mali busied herself with laying out a rough bed
in the hut for Muriel, and making her a pillow of soft moss and the
curious lichen-like material that hangs parasitic from the trees, and is
commonly known as "old man's beard." As both Mali and Felix assured her
confidently no harm would come to her within so strict a Taboo, Muriel,
worn out with fatigue and terror, lay down at last and slept soundly on
this native substitute for a bedstead. She slept without dreaming, while
Mali lay at her feet, ready at a moment's call. It was all so strange;
and yet she was too utterly wearied to do otherwise than sleep, in spite
of her strange and terrible surroundings.

Felix slept, too, for some hours, but woke with a start in the night. It
was raining heavily. He could hear the loud patter of a fierce tropical
shower on the roof of his hut. His Shadow, at his feet, slept still
unmoved; but when Felix rose on his elbow, the Shadow rose on a sudden,
too, and confronted him curiously. The young man heard the rain; then he
bowed down his face with an awed air, not visible, but audible, in the
still darkness. "It has come!" he said, with superstitious terror. "It
has come at last! my lord has brought it!"

After that, Felix lay awake for some hours, hearing the rain on the roof,
and puzzled in his own head by a half-uncertain memory. What was it in
his school reading that that ceremony with the water indefinitely
reminded him of? Wasn't there some Greek or Roman superstition about
shaking your head when water