The hours rolled on, the sun blazed, the world forgot its siesta, while the shadow on the Governor’s face deepened with the waning of the day. He sat in the Place and waited--round him a staff of messengers coming and going, as fresh thoughts and possibilities thronged his anxious mind. Presently, as hope faded and grew wan, he said-- ‘I can bear it no more here, I will go up and wait in the Cathedral--perchance God will send me inspiration,’ and he took his way thither.... Now, if one desires to see the most perfect picture in the world, one may look upon it--if one goes in the evening to the Cathedral at Noumea, and, standing at the eastern end, looks down the aisle to the west. There, framed in the grey walls, hangs a picture as of heaven--not, indeed, of canvas and paint, but of the sea and the air and the earth, as a man sees them when the glow of a setting sun is flooding and filling all with an unearthly glory of light. So the Governor, even in his great grief, saw the vision of heaven, and bowing his head upon his hands, sat gazing thereon--silent and alone. As the sun dipped he fell, worn out, into a sort of trance, rousing himself with a start as the rim of the fiery globe rested lightly on the horizon, seeming to poise itself before sinking to rest, while the grey shadows of the twilight crept out, as if eager before their time to whelm the last hopes of the day in a filmy maze. Out of the West, before the eyes of the Governor--far away in a reverie of pain--floated a white cloud, and dimly his mind became conscious of it. ‘Very odd cloud,’ he thought abstractedly, ‘that comes so suddenly and close;’ then he sprang up as though he had been shot. ‘Was it a cloud? No, assuredly it was not.’ It floated, it quivered, it waggled with the breeze, it was--bathos--it was a nightgown. Suspended between sky and earth in the middle of that picture of heaven, fading already with the growing darkness, waved a child’s nightgown. Instinctively the answer to the whole problem of the day’s disappearance flashed before the Governor’s mind, and what he saw when he had hurried through the door under the folds of that flag of truce came as no surprise. He stood and gazed upwards. Down below in the streets of the town, in all the country round, the buzz was still actively engaged in pursuing the promised satisfaction of its stomach.