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 ing as to whether she would broach to and be dashed against the coral.

But Poni was used to lagoon waters and the schooner safe in his hands came dead for the centre of the opening; then the ebb took her, like an arrow she came past the piers of coral, met the wash of the cross sea, shook herself and then to the thunder of thrashing, cleared the land and headed north.

“She will eat the wind,” Aioma had once said, “there will be no more wind left for canoes in all the islands”; and now as Poni shifted the helm and the main boom stuttered and then lashed out to port, she was eating the wind indeed, the wind that was coming now almost dead aft. The smashing of the seas against her bows had ceased: with a following swell and a following breeze, silence took them—silence broken only by the creak of timber, block and cordage.

Le Moan looked back again. Almost behind them to the sou’-sou’west Karolin lay with the morning splendour on its vast outer beach whose song came faint across the blue sea, on the tall palms bending to the wind, on its gulls for ever fishing.

Her eyes trained to great distances could pick out the thicker tree clumps where the houses lay and near the trees on a higher point of coral something that was not coral; the form of a girl, a mote in the sea dazzle now perceived, now gone.

Le Moan watched till the reef line was swallowed by the shimmer from which the trees rose as if footed in the sea. She had stirred no hand in the whole of this