Gabrielle of the Lagoon. W. H. Myddleton

looked at the sunset; he half fancied that it had always been staring from the ocean rim, and would never set! And as he looked at the dancing figure she really did seem to hold a goblet in her outstretched hand—full to the brim—with the gold of sunset that touched the landscape and was glinting over her tumbling hair and eyes.

      “The Solomon Isles! The Solomon Isles!” was all that he could breathe to himself as she stared at him, a strange fixed look in her eyes. A cockatoo fluttered down to the lowest bough of the bread-fruit tree, looked sideways on her swaying figure, slowly flapped its blue-tipped wings in surprise and chuckled discordantly.

      “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!” chimed in Hillary, as he clapped his hands, stared idiotically and felt like hiding behind the thick trunk of the bread-fruit.

      “Well now! You dance perfectly!” he gasped. Gabrielle had ceased tripping. She looked embarrassed and had begun to coil up her tumbling tresses.

      “Worth chewing salt-horse and hard-tack on a dozen voyages to have seen what I’ve seen!” was the apprentice’s inward reflection.

      “Do the girls in England dance like that?” she said in an eager, frightened way.

      “Oh no, not as well as you’ve danced. Blest if they do!” said he. That last remark of hers made him realise that girl before him was half-wild and had danced before him as a child might ere it became self-conscious. “Fancy meeting a beautiful white girl, half-wild! It’s thrilling! I wonder what will be the end of it,” mused Hillary, as he stared on that strange maid whom he had chanced upon so suddenly.

      Suddenly she said: “I’m no good at all; you may think I am, but I’m not.”

      “Aren’t you?” murmured Hillary, somewhat taken aback.

      “You’re a clever girl. Not many girls can quote the poets and rattle off verses as you can. I suppose your father’s an educated kind of man and has a good library?” he added after a pause.

      Gabrielle’s hearty peal of laughter at the idea of her father possessing a library made the frightened parrots flutter in a wheel-like procession over the belt of shoreward mangroves. Then she said: “Well, my father has got a lot of books, but they really belonged to a ship’s captain—a nice old man who lived with us years ago, when I was a child.” Then she added: “His ship was blown ashore here in a typhoon and when he went away he left all his books behind him in Dad’s bungalow. I’ve learned almost all I know from those books.” Saying this, she pointed with her finger towards the shore, and said: “From the top of that hill you can see the old captain’s ship to-day: it’s a big wreck with three masts. Father told me that the old captain often got sentimental and went up on the hills to stare through a telescope at his old ship lying on the reefs.”

      “How romantic! So I’ve to thank the old captain that you can quote the works of the poets to me,” said Hillary. Then he added: “But still, you’re a clever girl, there’s no doubt about it.”

      “I’m secretly wicked, down in the very depths of me.”

      “No! Surely not!” gasped the apprentice as he stared at the girl.

      Then he smiled and said quickly: “What you’ve just said is proof enough that you’re not wicked. You’re imaginative, and so you imagine that you have limitations that no one else has. If anyone’s wicked it’s me, I know,” he added, laughing quietly.

      “I’ve got the limitations right enough, that’s why I feel so strange and miserable at times.”

      “Don’t feel miserable, please don’t,” said Hillary softly as he blessed the silence of the primitive spot and the opportunity that had arisen for his direct sympathy.

      “You must remember that we all have our besetting sins, and that the majority of us think our besetting sin is our prime virtue,” he said. “I’ve been all over the world but never met a girl like you before,” he added in a sentimental way.

      “I can take that as the reverse of a compliment,” said Gabrielle, laughing musically.

      “Believe me, Gabrielle, I would not say things to you that I might say in a bantering way to other girls I’ve met. I dreamed of you when I was a child, so to speak. It seems strange that I should at last have met you out here in the Solomon Isles, that we should be sitting here by a blue lagoon in which our shadows seem to swim together.”

      “Look into those dark waters,” he added after a pause.

      Gabrielle looked, and as she looked Hillary became bold and placed his hand softly on her shoulder, amongst her golden tresses that tumbled about her neck. And Gabrielle, who could see every act as she stared on their images in the water, smiled.

      “It’s a pity you’re so wicked,” said Hillary jokingly. Then he added suddenly: “Ah! I could fall madly in love with a girl, like you if only I thought I were worthy of you.—What’s the matter?”

      “Oh, nothing,” said Gabrielle. Hillary noticed that she had become pale and trembling.

      “Why, you’ve caught a chill!” he said in monstrous concern, though it was 100° in the shade and the heat-blisters were ripe to burst on his neck.

      “Dad thinks everything that he does is quite perfect,” Gabrielle said, just to change the conversation, for the look she saw in the young apprentice’s eyes strangely smote her heart.

      “Of course he does,” said Hillary absently.

      The girl, looking eagerly into his face, said: “You know quite well that you play your violin beautifully, I suppose?”

      “I’m the rottenest player in the world.”

      The girl at this gave a merry ripple of laughter and said: “Now I do believe in your theory, for I’ve heard you play beautifully in the grog bar by Rokeville. You played this”—here she closed her lips and hummed a melody from Il Trovatore.

      “Good gracious! you don’t mean to tell me that you hover about the Rokeville grog shanty after dark?” exclaimed Hillary.

      Gabrielle seemed surprised at his serious look, then she burst into another silvery peal of laughter that echoed to the mountains.

      Hillary looked into her eyes, and seeing that eerie light of witchery which so fascinated him, felt that he had met his fate.

      “If I can’t get her to love me I’m as good as dead,” was his mental comment. Even the music of her laughter thrilled him. Then she rose from the ferns, and sitting on the banyan bough again started to swing to and fro, singing some weird strain that she had evidently learnt from the tambu dancers in the tribal villages.

      “It seems like some wonderful dream, she a beautiful girl with flowers in her hair, sitting there singing to me,” thought the apprentice.

      Then she looked down at him, gave a mischievous peal of laughter, and said: “Oh, I say, you are a flatterer! I almost forgot who I really was while you were saying those poetic things about me!”

      “Don’t laugh at me, I’m serious enough,” Hillary responded, as he looked earnestly at the swaying figure. Heaven knows how far Hillary might have progressed in his love affair had not the usual noisy interruption occurred at the usual crucial moment. Just as he felt the true hero of a South Sea romance—sitting there in a perfect picture of ferns and forest flowers, sunset fading on a sea horizon, dark-fingered palms bending tenderly over his beloved by a lagoon—with a rude rush out of the forest it came! It was not a ferocious boar, or revengeful elephant; it was a bulky, heavily breathing figure that seemed the embodiment of prosaic reality. It was attired in large, loose pantaloons, belted at the waist, a vandyke beard and mighty, viking-like moustachios drooping down to the Herculean shoulder curves.

      “What the blazes!” gasped Hillary, as he looked over his shoulder and saw that massive personality step out from underneath the forest palms. The strange being wore an antediluvian topee and an extraordinary, old-fashioned, long-tailed coat. The atmosphere of another age