Still, even so, he was brave enough to feel he must never let the very worst of all befall her.  He bethought him, in his doubt and agony, of how his uncle, Major Thurstan, during the great Indian mutiny, had held his lonely bungalow, with his wife and daughter by his side, for three long hours against a howling mob of native insurgents; and how, when further resistance was hopeless, and that great black wave of angry humanity burst in upon them at last, the brave soldier had drawn his revolver, shot his wife and daughter with unerring aim, to prevent their falling alive into the hands of the natives, and then blown his own brains out with his last remaining cartridge.  As his uncle had done at Jhansi, thirty years before, so he himself would do on that nameless Pacific island—­for he didn’t know even now on what shore he had landed.  If the savages bore down upon them with hostile intent, and threatened Muriel, he would plunge his knife first into that innocent woman’s heart; and then bury it deep in his own, and die beside her.

So the long night wore on—­Muriel pillowed on loose cocoanut husk, dozing now and again, and waking with a start to gaze round about her wildly, and realize once more in what plight she found herself; Felix crouching by her feet, and keeping watch with eager eyes and ears on every side for the least sign of a noiseless, naked footfall through the tangled growth of that dense tropical under-bush.  Time after time he clapped his hand to his ear, shell-wise, and listened and peered, with knitted brow, suspecting some sudden swoop from an ambush in the jungle of creepers behind the little plantain patch.  Time after time he grasped his knife hard, and puckered his eyebrows resolutely, and stood still with bated breath for a fierce, wild leap upon his fancied assailant.  But the night wore away by degrees, a minute at a time, and no man came; and dawn began to brighten the sea-line to eastward.

As the day dawned, Felix could see more clearly exactly where he was, and in what surroundings.  Without, the ocean broke in huge curling billows on the shallow beach of the fringing reef with such stupendous force that Felix wondered how they could ever have lived through its pounding surf and its fiercely retreating undertow.  Within, the lagoon spread its calm lake-like surface away to the white coral shore of the central atoll.  Between these two waters, the greater and the less, a waving palisade of tall-stemmed palm-trees rose on a narrow ribbon of circular land that formed the fringing reef.  All night through he had felt, with a strange eerie misgiving, the very foundations of the land thrill under his feet at every dull thud or boom of the surf on its restraining barrier.  Now that he could see that thin belt of shore in its actual shape and size, he was not astonished at this constant shock; what surprised him rather was the fact that such a speck of land could hold its own at all against the ceaseless cannonade of that seemingly irresistible ocean.