The day passed away, and night came on.  As it approached, heavy clouds drifted up from eastward.  Mali busied herself with laying out a rough bed in the hut for Muriel, and making her a pillow of soft moss and the curious lichen-like material that hangs parasitic from the trees, and is commonly known as “old man’s beard.”  As both Mali and Felix assured her confidently no harm would come to her within so strict a Taboo, Muriel, worn out with fatigue and terror, lay down at last and slept soundly on this native substitute for a bedstead.  She slept without dreaming, while Mali lay at her feet, ready at a moment’s call.  It was all so strange; and yet she was too utterly wearied to do otherwise than sleep, in spite of her strange and terrible surroundings.

Felix slept, too, for some hours, but woke with a start in the night.  It was raining heavily.  He could hear the loud patter of a fierce tropical shower on the roof of his hut.  His Shadow, at his feet, slept still unmoved; but when Felix rose on his elbow, the Shadow rose on a sudden, too, and confronted him curiously.  The young man heard the rain; then he bowed down his face with an awed air, not visible, but audible, in the still darkness.  “It has come!” he said, with superstitious terror.  “It has come at last! my lord has brought it!”

After that, Felix lay awake for some hours, hearing the rain on the roof, and puzzled in his own head by a half-uncertain memory.  What was it in his school reading that that ceremony with the water indefinitely reminded him of?  Wasn’t there some Greek or Roman superstition about shaking your head when water was poured upon it?  What could that superstition be, and what light might it cast on that mysterious ceremony?  He wished he could remember; but it was so long since he’d read it, and he never cared much at school for Greek or Roman antiquities.

Suddenly, in a lull of the rain, the whole context at once came back with a rush to him.  He remembered now he had read it, some time or other, in some classical dictionary.  It was a custom connected with Greek sacrifices.  The officiating priest poured water or wine on the head of the sheep, bullock, or other victim.  If the victim shook its head and knocked off the drops, that was a sign that it was fit for the sacrifice, and that the god accepted it.  If the victim trembled visibly, that was a most favorable omen.  If it stood quite still and didn’t move its neck, then the god rejected it as unfit for his purpose.  Couldn’t that be the meaning of the ceremony performed on Muriel and himself in “Heaven” that morning?  Were they merely intended as human sacrifices?  Were they to be kept meanwhile and, as it were, fed up for the slaughter?  It was too horrible to believe; yet it almost looked like it.

He wished he knew the meaning of that strange word, “Korong.”  Clearly, it contained the true key to the mystery.

Anyhow, he had always his trusty knife.  If the worst came to the worst—­those wretches should never harm his spotless Muriel.