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Thoroughly he explored every nook and corner of the village As soon as his strength perion He thought at ti the Folk who followed and surrounded him, unless he expressly waved them away, some hard looks here or there Instinctively he felt that a few of the people, here one, there one, still held hate and bitterness against him as an alien and an interloper

But the er to serve and care for hirateful almost to adoration, that Stern felt ashamed of his own suspicions and of the revolver that he still always carried whenever outside the patriarch's hut

And in his heart he buried his fears as unworthy delusions, as the is of a brain still hurt The occasional black looks of one or another of the people, or perchance some sullen, muttered word, he set down as the crude manners of a primitive and barbarous race

How little, despite all his skill and wit, he could foresee the truth!

To Beatrice he spoke no word of his occasional uneasiness, nor yet to the old man Yet one of the very firstof the revolvers, which had been rescued out of the iven to the patriarch, who had kept theious devotion

Stern put in half a day cleaning and oiling the weapons He found there still reirl's These he now looked upon as his most precious treasure He divided theo out unless she had her weapon securely belted on

Their life at home was simple in the extreme Beatrice had the inner room of the hut for her own Stern and the patriarch occupied the outer one And there, often far into the hours of the sleeping-ti within, he and the old man talked of the wonders of the past, of the outer world, of old traditions, of the abyss, and a thousand fascinating speculations

Particularly did the old man seek to understand soers had coh Stern tried rasp the principle of thevery seriously about the biplane; and he asked a score of questions relative to the qualities of the native oil, to currents in the sea, locations, depths, and so on