"It is nice to be able to walk on the flat of one's feet again," she said, and he led her down below to a cabin gorgeous as an Eastern room with drapings of amber silk and blue, and every bit of woodwork scoured as clean as elbow-grease could make it. "It is delightful," she said fervidly. "How you must have slaved at it!" "And how I enjoyed doing it!" There was a new sand hearth, nicely banked up between planks pegged upright on the floor, and a pile of wood on it ready for lighting. He lit a match with his flint and steel, and handed it to her as before, so that she might start the first fire in the new home. "You will take your old room," he said. "Then if we should topple over again you won't be able to fall out of your bunk. Now I'll go back and bring over all our belongings. I made a complete clearance here, except some of the stores which we can use," and before mid-day he had everything transferred and stowed away. He spent most of the afternoon weaving in and out of their rusty cable lengths of the least-rotten rope he could lay hands on, in order to strengthen it and stop its chafing as much as possible. But below water he could not go beyond a foot or two, and the lower links he had to leave to Providence. As he worked, The Girl paced the deck, rejoicing in its horizontality, and came each time to lean over the bows and watch him and say a lively word or two. And, if any had been there to see, it would have been difficult to believe that two such cheerful people were, to the very best of their belief, condemned by an inscrutable fate to imprisonment for life on this lonely sandbank,--to a confinement as solitary in some respects, and in the prospect of escape as hopeless, as that of the Bastille itself. But--they were together; and Adam and Eve, cast out of the Garden, could still make a home in the wilderness and turn the joys that were left them to fullest account. L He was up betimes next morning, and had fish for their breakfast before she came out of her room, and, moreover, had made cakes and full provision for all her needs during the day. "I shall go out there at once," he said. "You will not mind being left? I want to get in everything we shall need for the winter as soon as possible." "I am sorry not to be able to help, but I shall be quite all right here. You will..." she began, with a quite novel access of timidity, and finished with a rush,--"you will be very careful. I am rather fearful of that horrid wreckage. If you never came back----" "I will be very careful, and I will certainly come back--laden, I hope, with good things," and he went off on the raft, and she stood watching and waving her hand at times when he turned, until he disappeared along the spit. And as he went his heart beat high, for he did not believe that her fears were chiefly for herself, although she had made it appear so.