glances of half-insane suspicion. He selected a grave somewhat deeper than its fellows, in the bottom of which he had already placed a sheet.

With great difficulty, and with such clumsy reverence as he could command, he lowered Pearl's body into the pit, clambered down and disposed the limbs carefully, kissed her cold lips again and again, and then reluctantly drew a second sheet over her from head to heel. Next he fell to shovelling in the earth. Ah, how those falling clods hurt him as they fell upon her! How he winced at the sound of their dull impact! But it must be done-it was for her sake; he set his teeth, and dug with furious energy.

At last the grave was filled to the brim, and Tracy, shaken by dry sobs, passed mechanically on to the next, and then the next. In this manner, in less than an hour, he had covered in every one of his excavations, and so cunningly had he worked that there was nothing whereby an observer could distinguish between that which Pearl's body occupied and the others which were empty. To a casual stranger it would have appeared that the soil about the roots of all the fruittrees had been upturned with a care and energy very unusual in a native gardener, but the secret which was locked in Walter Tracy's bosom was one which not even Mûrut curiosity would be able to discover.

The dawn was breaking greyly when, his heavy task accomplished, Tracy stood bareheaded in the centre of his compound, and read in the wan light the solemn words of the Burial Service. Then, with the daybreak anthem of the birds ringing through the shady grove, he walked back into his empty bungalow. He stumbled to his bedroom, worn out in body and mind, threw himself down upon the sheets, and fell at once into a

deep, dreamless sleep. It was not only Pearl Tracy's body, perhaps, which that night of strenuous toil had saved from destruction.

Walter Tracy has fared far since that day, has garnered much honour and fame, such measure of wealth as may fall to the lot of a Colonial civil servant, and a whole comet's-tail of capital letters after his name. Promotion has borne him far away from Labuan to other and happier lands, yet that little sunbaked island, cast away upon the coast of northern Borneo, is more dear to him, I think, than any spot on earth. It is true that its memories haunt him as the scene of the overshadowing tragedy of his life; but none the less he often revisits in spirit the nameless grave, hidden beneath the shade of the fruit-trees that cluster about an ancient bungalow-the grave, the site of which is known to him alone, wherein lies buried very peacefully the treasure of his heart.

THE END.

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