The
Professor's money and the girl's hand! The words made me physically
sick, and I sat down upon the floor of the place till the dizziness had
passed from my brain.
"And food?" Holman put the question, but the words seemed to come to me
from a great distance.
"He told us he would lower it to us once a day till we--till we came to
our senses," said Edith Herndon quietly. "We received our first supply
some hours ago."
She tried to speak bravely, but the little catch in her voice belied the
courageous front which she endeavoured to assume under cover of the
darkness. Barbara was silent, except for an occasional sob which she was
unable to stifle, while the Professor poured forth his story of Leith's
deception when he first met him in Sydney, and where the big scoundrel
had poured into the ears of the laurel-hungry scientist the tales of
skulls and ruins which he would find upon the Isle of Tears. The skulls
and ruins were there, but it looked as if we would add our own skeletons
to the crumbling bones of the long-dead Polynesians, the peculiarities
of whose whitened brain cases were to supply the subject matter of the
learned treatise that was to bring fame to the archaeologist.
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