“I am sure Tennyson saw our island with poetic eye, for he goes on—­

  “’No sail from day to day, but every day
  The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
  Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
  The blaze upon the waters to the east;
  The blaze upon his island overhead;
  The blaze upon the waters to the west;
  Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
  The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
  The scarlet shafts of sunrise—­but no sail.”

She declaimed the melodious verse with a subtle skill that amazed her hearer.  Profoundly moved, Jenks dared not trust himself to speak.

“I read the whole poem the other day,” she said after a silence of some minutes.  “Sorrowful as it is, it comforted me by comparison.  How different will be our fate to his when ’another ship stays by this isle’!”

Yet neither of them knew that one line she had recited was more singularly applicable to their case than that which they paid heed to.  “The great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,” were shining clear and bright in the vast arch above.  Resplendent amidst the throng rose the Pleiades, the mythological seven hailed by the Greeks as an augury of safe navigation.  And the Dyaks—­one of the few remaining savage races of the world—­share the superstition of the people who fashioned all the arts and most of the sciences.

The Pleiades form the Dyak tutelary genius.  Some among a bloodthirsty and vengeful horde were even then pointing to the clustering stars that promised quick voyage to the isle where their kinsmen had been struck down by a white man who rescued a maid.  Nevertheless, Grecian romance and Dyak lore alike relegate the influence of the Pleiades to the sea.  Other stars are needed to foster enterprise ashore.

CHAPTER X

REALITY V.  ROMANCE—­THE CASE FOR THE PLAINTIFF

Night after night the Pleiades swung higher in the firmament; day after day the sailor perfected his defences and anxiously scanned the ocean for sign of friendly smoke or hostile sail.  This respite would not have been given to him, were it not for the lucky bullet which removed two fingers and part of a third from the right hand of the Dyak chief.  Not even a healthy savage can afford to treat such a wound lightly, and ten days elapsed before the maimed robber was able to move the injured limb without a curse.

Meanwhile, each night Jenks slept less soundly; each day his face became more careworn.  He began to realize why the island had not been visited already by the vessel which would certainly be deputed to search for them—­she was examining the great coast-line of China and Siam.

It was his habit to mark the progress of time on the rudely made sun-dial which sufficiently served their requirements as a clock.  Iris happened to watch him chipping the forty-fourth notch on the edge of the horizontal block of wood.