"Isn't it wonderful?" she murmured. "I wonder if we had never met if you would have found someone else----" "Never anyone to fill my heart as you do. I cannot even imagine it." "And if I should have found someone else?" "That is possible, but no one who could feel for you all that I do, or could want you as much as I do. You are to me the one supreme good," and the clasp of his arm told her even more than his words. "You do not ask me if I had any ties in the old life," she began. "You would not be lying in my arm like this if there were. I know you too well." "That is true and I thank you. It is good to be taken on trust. But indeed there were none. The men one met there--faugh!--they were masquers, puppets, dandies;--some had brains, but few had hearts, and they were most dreadful liars. Such talents as they possessed were devoted to finesse and intrigue, and the turning of everything to their own satisfaction and advantage." "Thank God you are out of it all." "Yes, I do thank God,--for the shipwreck and everything else, but chiefly that He sent you here to meet me and took that other one away." The weather held still for a few days, and he spent them in providing for her future comfort in every way he could think of. He chopped logs enough to last them through the winter, and piled them in stacks about the house. He got over from the ship supplies in abundance. As the result of much labour and many failures he constructed a primitive lamp out of the silver mug from which Macro used to swill his rum. He distorted a beak out of one side of it, and contrived a wick which passed through a hole in a piece of beaten copper, and if the light was not brilliant it was at all events steadier to read by than the dancing flames. He had lighted quite by accident on Macro's hidden hoard in the hold of the 'Jane and Mary.' He was rooting in a corner there for his knife, which had worked out of its sheath at his back as he hoisted out provisions, and found it sticking point downwards in a plank. As he pulled it out, the plank gave slightly, and lifting it he found, underneath, the useless treasure. He wanted none of it, was indeed loth to touch it, but, on consideration, took out two more silver mugs for their daily service and half a dozen gold pins and brooches for Avice's use, since she was always needing such things and regretting her lack of them. The long spell of mild soft weather--which had come at last to have in it a sense of sickness and decay--broke up in the wildest storm they had yet seen.