occasion arose for it.  Muriel took counsel with Mali on the question of rousing the Frenchman if a steamer appeared, and they were the first to sight it; and Mali, in whom renewed intercourse with white people had restored to some extent the civilized Queensland attitude of mind, readily enough promised to assist in their scheme, provided she was herself taken with them, and so relieved from the terrible vengeance which would otherwise overtake her.  “If Boupari man catch me,” she said, in her simple, graphic, Polynesian way, “Boupari man kill me, and lay me in leaves, and cook me very nice, and make great feast of me, like him do with Jani.”  From that untimely end both Felix and Muriel promised faithfully, as far as in them lay, to protect her.

To communicate with M. Peyron by daytime, without arousing the ever-wakeful suspicion of the natives, Felix hit upon an excellent plan.  He burnished his metal matchbox to the very highest polish it was capable of taking, and then heliographed by means of sun-flashes on the Morse code.  He had learned the code in Fiji in the course of his official duties; and he taught the Frenchman now readily enough how to read and reply with the other half of the box, torn off for the purpose.

It was three or four days, however, before the two English wanderers ventured to return M. Peyron’s visit.  They didn’t wish to attract too greatly the attention of the islanders.  Gradually, as their stay on the island went on, they learned the truth that Tu-Kila-Kila’s eyes, as he himself had boasted, were literally everywhere.  For he had spies of his own, told off in every direction, who dogged the steps of his victims unseen.  Sometimes, as Felix and Muriel walked unsuspecting through the jungle paths, closely followed by their Shadows, a stealthy brown figure, crouched low to the ground, would cross the road for a moment behind them, and disappear again noiselessly into the dense mass of underbrush.  Then Mali or Toko, turning round, all hushed, with a terrified look, would murmur low to themselves, or to one another, “There goes one of the Eyes of Tu-Kila-Kila!” It was only by slow degrees that this system of espionage grew clear to the strangers; but as soon as they had learned its reality and ubiquity, they felt at once how undesirable it would be for them to excite the terrible man-god’s jealousy and suspicion by being observed too often in close personal intercourse with their fellow-exile and victim, the Frenchman.  It was this that made them have recourse to the device of the heliograph.

So three or four days passed before Muriel dared to approach M. Peyron’s cottage.  When she did at last go there with Felix, it was in the early morning, before the fierce tropical sun, that beat full on the island, had begun to exert its midday force and power.  The path that led there lay through the thick and tangled mass of brushwood which covered the greater part of the island with its dense