a duffer, unknowing that Kearney was absolutely without inventive genius, and that the schooner was the work of a million men extending over three thousand years.
Katafa sitting beside Dick would watch Aioma as he brooded and played with the thing. It had no fascination for her. The little ships had always repelled her if anything. They were the only dividing point between her and Dick—she could not feel his pleasure or interest in them, and from this fact possibly arose a vague foreboding that perhaps some day in some way the little ships might separate them. When a woman loves, she can become jealous of a man’s pipe, of his tennis racket, of his best friend, of anything that she can’t share and which occupies his attention at times more than she does.
But the essence of jealousy is concentration, and Katafa’s green eye was cast not so much on the whole fleet as on the little schooner. This was Dick’s favourite, as it was Aioma’s.
One night, long after the vanishing of Le Moan, so long that every one had nearly forgotten her, Aioma had a delightful dream.
He dreamt that he was only an inch high and standing on the schooner’s deck. Dick reduced to the same stature was with him, and half a dozen others, and the schooner was in the rock pool that had spread to the size of Karolin lagoon. Oh, the joy of that business! They were hauling up the mainsail and up it
