And strange as it seemed, it was only a little more than two short hours since they had stood and looked out across the open sea over the bulwarks of the Australasian together!

But Felix had no time to moralize just then.  The moment was clearly one for action.  Fortunately, he happened to carry three useful things in his pocket when he jumped overboard after Muriel.  The first was a pocket-knife; the second was a flask with a little whiskey in it; and the third, perhaps the most important of all, a small metal box of wax vesta matches.  Pouring a little whiskey into the cup of the flask, he held it eagerly to Muriel’s lips.  The fainting girl swallowed it automatically.  Then Felix, stooping down, tried the matches against the box.  They were unfortunately wet, but half an hour’s exposure, he knew, on sun-warmed stones, in that hot, tropical air, would soon restore them again.  So he opened the box and laid them carefully out on a flat white slab of coral.  After that, he had time to consider exactly where they were, and what their chances in life, if any, might now amount to.

Pitch dark as it was, he had no difficulty in deciding at once by the general look of things that they had reached a fringing reef, such as he was already familiar with in the Marquesas and elsewhere.  The reef was no doubt circular, and it enclosed within itself a second or central island, divided from it by a shallow lagoon of calm, still water.  He walked some yards inland.  From where he now stood, on the summit of the ridge, he could look either way, and by the faint reflected light of the stars, or the glare of the great pyre that burned on the central island, he could see down on one side to the ocean, with its fierce white pounding surf, and on the other to the lagoon, reflecting the stars overhead, and motionless as a mill-pond.  Between them lay the low raised ridge of coral, covered with tall stems of cocoanut palms, and interspersed here and there, as far as his eye could judge, with little rectangular clumps of plantain and taro.

But what alarmed Felix most was the fire that blazed so brightly to heaven on the central island; for he knew too well that meant—­there were men on the place; the land was inhabited.

The cocoanuts and taro told the same doubtful tale.  From the way they grew, even in that dim starlight, Felix recognized at once they had all been planted.

Still, he didn’t hesitate to do what he thought best for Muriel’s relief for all that.  Collecting a few sticks and fragments of palm-branches from the jungle about, he piled them into a heap, and waited patiently for his matches to dry.  As soon as they were ready—­and the warmth of the stone made them quickly inflammable—­he struck a match on the box, and proceeded to light his fire by Muriel’s side.  As her clothes grew warmer, the poor girl opened her eyes at last, and, gazing around her, exclaimed, in blank terror, “Oh, Mr. Thurstan, where are we?  What does all this mean?  Where have we got to?  On a desert island?”