Hay stopped short with a shiver. The dawn was breaking in a long grey streak over the distant reef, and with it came a wave of chill air. The faces of all three men looked almost haggard in the growing light, and Taplin said, ‘Go on, man,’ in a voice that sounded harsh and strange. ‘There was only one thing to be done,’ continued Hay, slowly, ‘and I can tell you I didn’t care about doing it one little bit. Diving for a madman with a kriss in his hand in twelve feet of water, even if he _has_ gone down three times, is no sort of a pastime. Well, I found him at the second go, quite motionless at the bottom, and pulled him up ashore. He was unconscious all right, but I had the devil’s own trouble to get that silver streak out of his paw. Then I sat on my haunches, and rubbed him, and prayed the gods to send me help. Presently they did, in the shape of my wife and Judy, on horseback, with brandy and pistols. Judy wouldn’t come anywhere near, though he could see him lying like a log; but my wife, who, like most women where there’s illness, is an angel, helped me to get him on to a horse. Poor old chap, he was mighty limp and light, and the madness had clean gone out of him; his skin was white again, and his hair shorn--I suppose I must have been a bit mixed there. We held him on, and got him back somehow, and gave him brandy, and gradually he came back to life; but he had brain fever and was delirious for days. Then I got to know how fearfully the loneliness had weighed on him, and bitten into his marrow. At last he came round, and got all right again by degrees. He’s never had the faintest idea of what happened that night; the fever seemed to have wiped it clean out of his memory, and of course we’ve never told him. We got shifted here soon afterwards, and this place is chalks better than Luma, if it isn’t exactly the vortex of society. The saddest thing, as it turned out, over that business, was poor little Wasp. After we got back with him I went over to his quarters to fetch away his things, and there, lying on his bed, was that poor little beggar and four of the pups dead as door-nails, with kriss stabs right through them. The fifth pup was alive and whining piteously; we took her home and dragged her up somehow, and here she is.’ Hay touched a sleepy fox-terrier with his foot. ‘We had to tell Synge a yarn about Wasp’s death. I’ve forgotten how it went now, but I remember it was very artistic and untrue, and the whitest sort of a lie. Well, I’m tired of yarning, and that’s the whole show, and now perhaps you understand why my wife looked so queer to-night, and why’--he broke off, and tapped the butt end of the revolver. There was a long silence, which Clemenson broke with: ‘You don’t mean to say that you can go on living here with the possibility of that happening again?’