"None but dead men, if they can help it, apparently. You were an exception to the rule. So were we. We have none of us any right to be here alive." "If I had some shoes and stockings, and some proper clothes, I believe I could be quite happy here," she said. "That is if one has not also to starve." "There is no need to starve. The island is over-run with rabbits. There are fish in the lake here if only we could catch them, and out there among the wreckage are all kinds of things--casks of pork and beef, and coffee, and rum, and flour--enough to last us for hundreds of years." "It is a most excellent retreat." "If one were sick of the world. But you surely are too young to have arrived at that stage." "One may be young and yet be sick of one's world.... Sometime I will tell you.... Now, if you please, I will take a few of these things and you will show me your pool and I will wash them----" "Oh, I'll do all that for you----" "Not at all. Besides, with your permission and if you will leave me quite alone, I would like also to wash in fresh water. I too shall never feel quite dry until I have done so." He assisted her down to the other raft, through a break they had long since made in the side for that purpose, and paddled ashore. There he showed her the pool they had set apart for washing, and told her he would come back for her at whatever time she chose. "In two hours, please," and he went off into the sand-hills. But his mind stubbornly refused to interest itself in rabbits. He dropped down on the sunny side of a hummock and let his thoughts run on this most surprising addition to their company. What could possibly explain her,--young, beautiful, of undoubted birth and breeding, yet ready to renounce the world, of which her twenty years or so had apparently given her a surfeit, and to welcome the chance of a hermit life? It was a puzzle beyond any man's understanding. All his thinking led him only towards shadowy possibilities. And these the thought of her sweet face and clear frank outlook rejected instantly as libels on her fair fame, which he, with no more knowledge than he now had, yet felt himself prepared to defend with all his might against the whole world. If that girl was not all that she seemed and that he believed her to be, he would never trust his own judgment again. All the same, it was very amazing, and she filled his thoughts to such an extent that the rabbits hopped fearlessly about him as he sat thinking of her; and it was long after the two hours before he came to himself, and rewarded their temerity by knocking a couple on the head and striding away back to find her. She was sitting waiting for him, with a fresh-water brightness in her face, her hair coiled loosely round her head, and her washing still drying in the sun. She hastily bundled up her things at sight of him and came along to meet him. "I began to fear you had forgotten me," she said.