Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/269

 of eating nothing but muddy rice for so long. Don't think I'm silly—but—I thought I saw—Jane!"

Mark frowned. Then he clapped Alan on the shoulder.

"That's all right," he said. "You're pretty nearly all in. So am I. Buck up, now. Look at that jolly old house—it looks as if it was holding its skirt up out of the water!"

But Alan hesitated miserably.

"Mark," he said in a low voice, "you look. I don't dare. Sitting in the stern of a launch, to the right, just beyond the next boat."

Mark laughed to humor him.

"All right, I'll look."

The next moment his hand tightened painfully on his brother's arm, and Alan looked up to see him gazing, white-faced, across the waterway.

"It—it is Jane!" he whispered. "We—we couldn't both see it—not even with the rice."

But at that moment the vision changed to reality. Mr. Bolliver, who would scarcely be included in the hallucination, sprang up from beside the little girl whose eyes had met Mark's. They never knew how the space