The Blue Lagoon: A Romance
was lowered, the falls cast off, and the oars bent to the water.
The little dinghy made a mournful picture as she floated, looking
scarcely bigger than a walnut shell. In thirty strokes the whale-boat’s
nose was touching her quarter. Stannistreet grasped her gunwale.
In the bottom of the dinghy lay a girl, naked all but for a strip of
coloured striped material. One of her arms was clasped round the neck
of a form that was half hidden by her body, the other clasped partly to
herself, partly to her companion, the body of a baby. They were
natives, evidently, wrecked or lost by some mischance from some
inter-island schooner. Their breasts rose and fell gently, and clasped
in the girl’s hand was a branch of some tree, and on the branch a
single withered berry.
“Are they dead?” asked Lestrange, who divined that there were people in
the boat, and who was standing up in the stern of the whale-boat trying
to see.
“No,” said Stannistreet; “they are asleep.”
THE END