“Is it so terrible,” she asked, “to be left here alone with your Nadara?”
“It is not that,” he answered. “If you were mine I should not care so much, but you cannot be mine until we have reached civilization and you have been. made mine in accordance with the laws and customs of civilized men. And now who knows when another ship may come—if ever another will come?”
“But I am yours, Thandar,” insisted the girl. “You are my man—you have told me that you love me, and I have replied that I would be your mate—who can give us to each other better than we can give ourselves? ”
He tried, as best he could, to explain to her the marriage customs and ceremonies of his own world, but she found it difficult to understand how it might be that a stranger whom neither might possibly ever have seen before could make it right for her to love her Thandar, or that it should be wrong for her to love him without the stranger’s permission.
To Thandar the future looked most black and hopeless. With his sudden determination to take Nadara back to his own people he had been overwhelmed with a mad yearning for home.
He realized that his past apathy to the idea of returning to Boston had been due solely to recol-
