"You bet I won't," said Floyd. "How long will you be gone?"
"Three weeks to get there and three to get back, makes six weeks, and allowing for a fortnight there--let's say nine weeks to give it a margin. You may expect me back in the lagoon in nine weeks. If I'm not back by then, you may begin to suspect I'm with the sharks."
"Of course; and I'll take the best of the pearls, too, for several reasons. First to show our samples, second because I'm leaving you the lagoon. If I never come back, you'd have the lagoon, and if you bolted with the lagoon, I'd have the pearls.
"I won't take all the pearls, only a selection of the best."
"Oh, I don't mind," said Floyd. "I can trust you; and, even if I couldn't, you would not be such a fool as to leave a pearl lagoon for the sake, of a six weeks' take of pearls. Well, come on to supper; there's Isbel laying out the things; we can talk afterward."
Though the house was now finished, with the door on, and the table in, they always took their meals in the open. Isbel had laid the plates and knives and forks on a cloth before the door, and in the center of the cloth a kava bowl with some flowers in it.
Schumer was always very punctilious as to the service of meals, laying the cloth himself if no one else were there to do it. He had salved all the _Tonga_ linen, and he would doubtless have insisted on napkins had the _Tonga_ carried them; unable to go as far as napkins, he had contented himself with flowers. He believed in keeping up appearances, even if there were no one to observe these appearances but their two selves and Isbel, and he was right. Slackness is one of the rots of the world, and the least bit of ceremonial is the finest tonic in life.
Isbel, who never ate with them now by any chance, and who had voluntarily debased herself from the position of companion to the condition of servant, went off and left them to their food. The sun sank behind the reef, and in a sky of pansy blue the first vague sketch of the constellation began to show itself to the darkening sea. Then almost as though touched off by a taper, the stars blazed out, crusting with light the whole dome from the sea line to the zenith. It was the night before the new moon, and always on these nights when the whole lighting of the world was left to the stars a deeper peace seemed to pervade the island and the ocean and the sky. The voice of the reef seemed to sink lower, and the night wind to blow warmer, and the lagoon to hold in its depths a profounder calm.