The old man, lying upon his scant bed of matted, filthy grasses, had heard the conversation. He was as much at sea as Nadara. At last he spoke--very feebly now, for rapidly he was nearing dissolution. "I am a very old man," he said to Thandar. "I have not long to live. Before I die I should like to know that Nadara has a mate who will protect her. I love her, though--" He hesitated. "Though what?" asked Thandar. "I have never told," whispered the old fellow. "My mate would not let me, but now that I am about to die it can do no harm. Nadara is not my daughter." The girl sprang to her feet. "Not your daughter? Then who am I?" "I do not know who you are, except that you are not even of my people. All that I know I will tell you now before I die. Come close, for my voice is dying faster than my body." The young man and the girl came nearer to his side, and squatting there leaned close that they might catch each faintly articulated syllable. "My mate and I," commenced the old man, "were childless, though many moons had passed since I took her to my cave. She wanted a little one, for thus only may women have aught upon which to lavish their love. "We had been hunting together for several days alone and far from the village, for I was a great hunter when I was young--no greater ever lived among our people. "And one day we came down to the great water, and there, a short distance from the shore we saw a strange thing that floated upon the surface of the water, and when it was blown closer to us we saw that it was hollow and that in it were two people--a man and a woman. Both appeared to be dead. "Finally I waded out to meet the thing, dragging it to shore, and there sure enough was a man and a woman, and the man was dead--quite dead. He must have been dead for a long time; but the woman was not dead. "She was very fair though her eyes and hair were black. We carried her ashore, and that night a little girl was born to her, but the woman died before morning. "We put her back into the strange thing that had brought her--she and the dead man who had come with her--and shoved them off upon the great water, where the breeze, which had changed over night, together with the water which runs away from the land twice each day carried them out of sight, nor ever did we see them again. "But before we sent them off my mate took from the body of the woman her strange coverings and a little bag of skin which contained many sparkling stones of different colors and metals of yellow and white made into things the purposes of which we could not guess. "It was evident that the woman had come from a strange land, for she and all her belongings were unlike anything that either of us ever had seen before. She herself was different as Nadara is different--Nadara looks as her mother looked, for Nadara is the little babe that was born that night.