In the mornings my father set aside an hour when the sick could be brought to our house to be attended and there was no doubt that the health of the islanders had improved since our coming. The people were aware of this and my father was regarded with respect and awe. My mother, I think, was loved; and I was looked on with affection.

We were welcome on Vulcan Island.

In two years since our coming my father had established himself as lord of the island, and my mother told me later that as time passed they realized that it was hardly likely anyone would arrive on the ship to take him away to stand trial for murder. The coming of the boat was then something to look forward to because it brought books, clothes, special foods, wines and medicines.

It was indeed an exciting day when one awoke to see the big ship lying at anchor off the island. Early in the morning the canoes would go out and come back laden with the goods my father had ordered. How beautiful those canoes looked—light, slim and tapering! Some were about twenty feet long, others as much as sixty. Their prows and sterns were high and beautifully carved and they were the pride of their possessors. Cougabel told me that the prows and sterns protected the occupants of the canoes from arrows their enemies might shoot at them, for in the old days there had been much fighting among them.

I said the canoes looked like crescent moons dotted on the sea when they were a mile or so from land. They shone in the sunshine, for their prows and sterns were often decorated with mother-of-pearl. It astonished me how quickly the narrow pointed paddles carried them through the water.

So it seemed we had settled into the life of Vulcan Island.

I was growing up. The years passed so quickly that I lost count of them. My mother was teaching me and each day she insisted that she give me lessons. She was constantly ordering books from Sydney and I suppose I was becoming as educated as most girls of my age of a certain class who depended on governesses for their education.

Cougabel continued to share my lessons. She was growing up faster than I physically, for the girls of the island were mature at fourteen and many of them had become mothers at that age.

Cougabel loved my clothes and liked to dress up in them. My mother and I wore loose smocks—a fashion of my mother's devising. Ordinary conventional garments would have been impossible in the heat. We had big hats of plaited fiber which my mother softened a great deal by soaking in oil—a method of her invention. She dyed them—mainly red from dragon tree juice, which we called dragon's blood. But she found other herbs and flowers growing on the island from which she managed to extract dyes. Cougabel wanted smocks and colorful hats such as we wore and she and I would go about together similarly clad. Sometimes, though, she would revert to her native dress and wear nothing but a fringed girdle made of shells and feathers which fell halfway down her thighs, leaving the upper part of her body exposed. Round her neck she would wear strings of shells and ornaments carved out of wood. She looked quite different then and somehow changed her personality. When she sat with me in her smock and did her lessons, I would forget that we were not of the same race. We were then simply two children in a country house.

I guessed, though, that Cougabel did not want me to forget she was an islander and a very special one at that.

Once we wandered to the foot of the mountain and she told me that the Grumbling Giant was her father. I did not see how a mountain could be a father and I laughed this to scorn. She grew angry. She could be passionately angry at times. Her mood changed abruptly and at that moment her great dark eyes flashed with fury.

"He is my father," she cried. "He is ... he is. ... I am a child of the Mask."

I was always interested to hear of the Mask and she went on: "My mother danced at the Mask Dance and the Giant came to her through some man ... unknown ... like he does at the Mask Dance. He shot me into her so that I grew and grew until I was a baby ready to be born."

"That's just a story," I said. I had not at that time learned when it was wise to keep one's opinions to oneself.

She turned round and flashed out at me: "You don't know. You only small one. You white... . You make Giant angry."

"My father is on very good terms with the Giant," I said somewhat mockingly, for I had heard my parents joke about the Giant.

"Giant sent Daddajo. He sent you to learn me... ."

"Teach you," I corrected. I enjoyed correcting Cougabel.

"He sent you to learn me," she insisted, her eyes narrowing. "When I am big and there's a Mask Dance I shall go out to dance and I shall come back with the Giant's baby in me."

I gazed at her in astonishment. Yes, I thought, we are growing up. Cougabel will soon be old enough to have a baby.

I grew thoughtful. Time was passing and we were losing count of it.

I was thirteen years old. I had been six years on the island. During that time my father had built up a flourishing industry and, although many people still died of various fevers, the death toll was considerably reduced.

My father was compiling a book about tropical diseases. He was planning to build a hospital. He was going to put everything he had into the project. All his dreams and hopes were for that hospital.

My mother, I realized, had something on her mind. One afternoon after the intense heat of the day had passed, we sat together under the shade of a palm tree watching the flying fishes skimming over the water.

"You're growing up, Suewellyn," she said. "Have you thought that you have not been off this island since we came?"

"Neither have you or my father."

"We have to stay ... but we have talked a lot about you. We worry about you, Suewellyn."

"Worry about me?"

"Yes, your education and your future."

"We are all together. It is what we wanted."

"Your father and I may not always be here."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm just drawing attention to a fact of life. It comes to an end, you know. Suewellyn, you ought to go away to school."

"School! But there is no school!"

"There is in Sydney."

"What! Leave the island?"

"It could be arranged. You would come back to us for holidays. Christmas ... and the summer. The boat takes only a week from Sydney. One week there ... one week back. You have to have some education beyond what I can give you."

"It is something that has never occurred to me."

"You have to be prepared in some way for the future."

"I couldn't leave you."

"It would only be for a time. When the boat next comes you and I will go to Sydney. We'll look at schools and decide what is to be done."

I was astounded and at first refused to consider the idea, but after a while they both talked to me and that sense of adventure which lay dormant in me was aroused. Mine was a strange upbringing. For six years or so I had lived in Crabtree Cottage where I had been brought up in rigid convention. Then I had been whisked away and brought to a primitive island. I imagined that the outside world would be very strange to me.

During the weeks that followed my feelings were mixed. I did not know whether I regretted this decision or was glad of it. But I did see the point of it.

When I told Cougabel that I was going away to school her reaction was violent. She stared at me with great flashing eyes and they seemed filled with hatred.

"I come. I come," she kept saying.

I tried to explain to her that she could not come. I had to go alone. My parents were sending me because people like us had to be educated and most of us went to school to receive that education.

She was not listening. It was a habit of Cougabel's to shut her mind to anything she did not want to hear.

A week before the ship was due my mother and I had made our preparations for departure. It was August. I should go to school in September and in December come back to the island. It was not a very long separation, my mother kept saying.

Then one morning Cougabel was missing. Her bed had not been slept in. She occupied a small bed in the room adjoining mine, for she wanted to sleep in a bed when she saw ours. In fact she wanted everything that I had and I was sure that if it had been suggested that she go away to school with me she would have been happy.

Cougaba was frantic.

"Where she go? She have taken her ornaments with her. See her smock here. She go in shells and feathers. Where she go?"

It was pitiful to hear her.

My father calmly pointed out that she must be on the island unless she had taken a canoe and gone to one of the others. It seemed sensible to search the island.

"She go to Giant," said Cougaba. "She go to him and ask him not let Little Missy go. Oh, it is wicked ... wicked to send Little Missy away. Little Missy belong ... Little Missy not go."

Cougaba rocked to and fro chanting: "Little Missy not go."

My father impatiently said that he did not doubt Cougabel would come back now she had given her mother a fright. But the day went on and she did not return. I was hurt and angry with her because she had shortened the time when we could be together.

But when the second day passed we all became anxious and my father sent search parties up the mountain.

Cougaba was trembling with terror and my mother and I tried to reassure her.

"I frightened," she said. "I very frightened, Mamabel."

"We will find her," soothed my mother.