Nevertheless, by high noon they were suffering again.  The time passed very slowly.  The sun rose to the zenith and filled earth and air with his ardor.  It seemed to be a miracle—­now appreciated for the first time in their lives—­that the sea did not dry up, and the leaves wither on the trees.  The silence, the deathly inactivity of all things, became intolerable.  The girl bravely tried to confine her thoughts to the task of the hour.  She displayed alert watchfulness, an instant readiness to warn her companion of the slightest movement among the trees or by the rocks to the north-west, this being the arc of their periphery assigned to her.

Looking at a sunlit space from cover, and looking at the same place when sweltering in the direct rays of a tropical sun, are kindred operations strangely diverse in achievement.  Iris could not reconcile the physical sensitiveness of the hour with the careless hardihood of the preceding days.  Her eyes ached somewhat, for she had tilted her sou’wester to the back of her head in the effort to cool her throbbing temples.  She put up her right hand to shade the too vivid reflection of the glistening sea, and was astounded to find that in a few minutes the back of her hand was scorched.  A faint sound of distant shouting disturbed her painful reverie.

“How is it,” she asked, “that we feel the heat so much today?  I have hardly noticed it before.”

“For two good reasons—­forced idleness and radiation from this confounded rock.  Moreover, this is the hottest day we have experienced on the island.  There is not a breath of air, and the hot weather has just commenced.”

“Don’t you think,” she said, huskily, “that our position here is quite hopeless?”

They were talking to each other sideways.  The sailor never turned his gaze from the southern end of the valley.

“It is no more hopeless now than last night or this morning,” he replied.

“But suppose we are kept here for several days?”

“That was always an unpleasant probability.”

“We had water then.  Even with an ample supply it would be difficult to hold out.  As things are, such a course becomes simply impossible.”

Her despondency pierced his soul.  A slow agony was consuming her.

“It is hard, I admit,” he said.  “Nevertheless you must bear up until night falls.  Then we will either obtain water or leave this place.”

“Surely we can do neither.”

“We may be compelled to do both.”

“But how?”

In this, his hour of extremest need, the man was vouchsafed a shred of luck.  To answer her satisfactorily would have baffled a Talleyrand.  But before he could frame a feeble pretext for his too sanguine prediction, a sampan appeared, eight hundred yards from Turtle Beach, and strenuously paddled by three men.  The vague hallooing they had heard was explained.