"Heavens, child, what can I think? I don't know," I said unsteadily, revolving God knows what of possibilities in my presumptuous and selfish heart. "Why," she said simply, "I felt so badly that I went to Roger (in my mind) to tell him about it and show him the beautiful grave we had made and my black frock (I had a little pointed bonnet with white under the front, like the widows in Paris) and suddenly I remembered that I could not show him--he would be dead! You see that would have been very bad, for I had been planning all the time that he would be there to--to--well, _that he would be there_! You see what I mean, don't you, Jerry? Roger has to be there." "Yes, I see," I said, very low, filled with sickening shame, "he has to be there, my dear." "And so I stopped all that dying sickness directly," she continued comfortably, "because it was too silly, if I could not tell him about it afterwards, you see. "And yet he was very cross to me about the bread," she burst out childishly. "Why do I think he has to be there, Jerry? He cannot talk to me nearly so nicely as you can--he does not understand. Why must he be there?" I choked and laughed at once. "Because you love him, you silly Margarita!" I declared. "That must be it," she agreed, with a serious, long look at me out of those deep-sea coloured eyes. Ah, me! How we worked at that canal! Caliban and two swarthy Italians and Roger and I--for I marked out the course of it in an artfully natural curve and put in the stakes. There were eighty-odd feet across the part of the peninsula we selected, and it bade fair to wear us all out and last forever, till I seized the occasion of a business trip that took Roger away for four days and hired a great gang of labourers who finished it all up, so that he walked into his island home across a foot-bridge, to his great and boyish delight. What a big boy he was, after all! Not that I did not share his pleasure in the Island: it gave me a delicious feeling of security and distance from the rest of the world. With the help of the gang I had been able to widen our channel considerably and it took a very respectable bridge indeed to span the gap. We had made plans for a regular drawbridge, but later we abandoned them, and chopped even the old one down. The water has washed and washed and worn away since, on the island side, and now one must be bent upon a swim indeed who cares to venture among the jagged ledges and mill-races that my blasting made.