All the hopes of the three Europeans were concentrated now on the bare off-chance of a passing steamer. M. Peyron in particular was fully convinced that, if the Australasian had found the inner channel practicable, other ships in future would follow her example. With this idea firmly fixed in his head, he arranged with Felix that one or other of them should keep watch alternately by night as far as possible; and he also undertook that a canoe should constantly be in readiness to carry them away to the supposititious ship, if 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 vegetation; it was overhung by huge tree-ferns and broad-leaved Southern bushes, and abutted at last on the little wind-swept knoll where the King of the Birds had his appropriate dwelling-place. The Frenchman received them with studied Parisian hospitality. He had decorated his arbor with fresh flowers for the occasion, and bright tropical fruits, with their own green leaves, did duty for the coffee or the absinthe of his fatherland on his homemade rustic table. Yet in spite of all the rudeness of the physical surroundings, they felt themselves at home again with this one exiled European; the faint flavor of civilization pervaded and permeated the Frenchman’s hut after the unmixed savagery to which they had now been so long accustomed.

Muriel’s curiosity, however, centred most about the mysterious old parrot, of whose strange legend so much had been said to her. After they had sat for a little under the shade of the spreading banyan, to cool down from their walk—for it was an oppressive morning—M. Peyron led her round to his aviary at the back of the hut, and introduced her, by their native names, to all his subjects. “I am responsible for their lives,” he said, gravely, “for their welfare, for their happiness. If I were to let one of them grow old without a successor in the field to follow him up and receive his soul—as in the case of my friend Methuselah here, who was so neglected by my predecessors—the whole species would die out for want of a spirit, and my own life would atone for that of my people. There you have the central principle of the theology of Boupari. Every race, every element, every power of nature, is summed up for them in some particular person or thing; and on the life of that person or thing depends, as they believe, the entire health of the species, the sequence of events, the whole order and succession of natural phenomena.”

Felix approached the mysterious and venerable bird with somewhat incautious fingers. “It looks very old,” he said, trying to stroke its head and neck with a friendly gesture. “You do well, indeed, in calling it Methuselah.”

As he spoke, the bird, alarmed at the vague consciousness of a hand and voice which it did not recognize and mindful of Tu-Kila-Kila’s recent attack, made a vicious peck at the fingers outstretched to caress it. “Take care!” the Frenchman cried, in a warning voice. “The patriarch’s temper is no longer what it was sixty or seventy years ago. He grows old and peevish. His humor is soured. He will sing no longer the lively little scraps of Offenbach I have taught him. He does nothing but sit still and mumble now in his own forgotten language. And he’s dreadfully cross—so crabbed—mon Dieu, what a character! Why, the other day, as I told you, he bit Tu-Kila-Kila himself, the high god of the island, with a good hard peck, when that savage tried to touch him; you’d have laughed to see his godship sent off bleeding to his hut with a wounded finger! I will confess I was by no means sorry at the sight myself. I do not love that god, nor h............