Extract from a Modern Novel.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 17, 26 April 1911, Page 8

Extract from a Modern Novel.

The island was not only uninhabited, it was an absolute desert —a mere bank of sand. The man was the only thing on it. Remorselessly the sun sank toward the Western horizon. The man gazed at it with slowly increasing consternation. Whatever else he may have been he was unmistakably a gentleman. The very fibers of his deepest being cried out for the niceties of civilised society. He might die, he might perish, he might suffer cruel hunger ; worn out with fatigue and long nights passed in sleepless watching, it is barely conceivable that he might sleep without pajamas, but this—this was too much. Again he gazed at the remorseless sun measured the distance between it and the horizon, calculated the time of day, a feat which his high training and specialization in trigonometry at the greatest university in the world made him able to perform with incredible ease ; and then, hero though he was, his face blanched. “ This is awful ! ”

Great beads of sweat stood out on his noble brow, he gazed about vacantly over the vacant seas, the vacant sands, the vacant air. Then he cast his eyes downward and looked at his coat. It was a sack coat. “This is horrible! ” “ I—l—cannot dress for dinner ! ” he muttered. It seemed unbelievable, absurd fantastic, the gruesome liorrer of a nightmare, and yet he was well aware that he waked and did not sleep and that the awful fact was true.

Again he gazed at the fast setting sun, and over his pale clenched lips came a smile of high resolve. “If I cannot live like a gentleman I can at least die,” he whispered, and the light of heroic devotion, that devotion, to an ideal which transcends the devotion to woman, or money, or even to tobacco, shone about his countenance, transfiguring it. He stepped into the edge of the water and waded out. When it was up to hm chin he paused. The quible that he had no dinner had come into his mind, but with another grim smile and a little toss of the head he dismissed it. He kaded on.

There was a little splashing of tihe blue water, a few bubbles eame to the face.

And then, beneath the. vacant sky,illumined, by the departing rays of the sun, the vacant waters bathed the vacant sands.