“Mrs. Joyce, I beg of you....”

The schooner rose and dipped again.

For what seemed an interminable time we paced the deck together while Lakalatcha flamed farther and farther astern.  Her words came in fitful snatches as if spoken in a delirium, and at times she would pause and grip the rail to stare back, wild-eyed, at the receding island.

Suddenly she started, and in a sort of blinding, noon-day blaze I saw her face blanch with horror.  It was as if at that moment the heavens had cracked asunder and the night had fallen away in chaos.  Turning, I saw the cone of the mountain lifting skyward in fragments—­and saw no more, for the blinding vision remained seared upon the retina of my eyes.

Across the water, slower paced, came the dread concussion of sound.

“Good God!  It’s carried away the whole island!” I heard the mate’s voice bellowing above the cries of the men.  The Sylph scudded before the approaching storm of fire redescending from the sky....

The first gray of the dawn disclosed Mrs. Joyce still standing by the rail, her hand nestling within the arm of her husband, indifferent to the heavy grayish dust that fell in benediction upon her like a silent shower of snow.

The island of Muloa remains to-day a charred cinder lapped about by the blue Pacific.  At times gulls circle over its blackened and desolate surface devoid of every vestige of life.  From the squat, truncated mass of Lakalatcha, shorn of half its lordly height, a feeble wisp of smoke still issues to the breeze, as if Vulcan, tired of his forge, had banked its fire before abandoning it.

THE ARGOSIES

BY ALEXANDER HULL

From Scribner’s Magazine

There may have been some benevolent force watching over Harber.  In any case, that would be a comforting belief.  Certainly Harber himself so believed, and I know he had no trouble at all convincing his wife.  Yes, the Harbers believed.

But credulity, you may say, was ever the surest part in love’s young golden dream:  and you, perhaps, not having your eyes befuddled with the rose-fog of romance, will see too clearly to believe.  What can I adduce for your conviction?  The facts only.  After all, that is the single strength of my position.

There was, of course, the strange forehanded, subtle planning of the other girl, of Janet Spencer.  Why did she do it?  Was it that, feeling her chances in Tawnleytown so few, counting the soil there so barren, driven by an ambition beyond the imagination of staid, stodgy, normal Tawnleytown girls, she felt she must create opportunities where none were?  She was very lovely, Harber tells me, in a fiery rose-red of the fairy-tale way; though even without beauty it needn’t have been hard for her.  Young blood is prone enough to adventure; the merest spark will set it akindle.  I should like to have known that girl.  She must have been very clever.  Because, of course, she couldn’t have foreseen, even by the surest instinct, the coincidence that brought Harber and Barton together.  Yes, there is a coincidence in it.  It’s precisely upon that, you see, that Harber hangs his belief.