‘M. Donat called it a jest,’ I wrote at the time in my diary. ‘It seemed to me more in the nature of a terrified conjuration, as though she would divert the ghost’s attention from herself. A cannibal race may well have cannibal phantoms.’ The guesses of the traveller appear foredoomed to be erroneous; yet in these I was precisely right. The woman had stood by in terror at the funeral, being then in a dread spot, the graveyard. She looked on in terror to the coming night, with that ogre, a new spirit, loosed upon the isle. And the words she had cried in Donat’s face were indeed a terrified conjuration, basely to shield herself, basely to dedicate another in her stead. One thing is to be said in her excuse. Doubtless she partly chose Donat because he was a man of great good-nature, but partl
