The lagoon at night was an ebony mirror flashing fluorescent streaks. The surf boomed threateningly only a few yards across the rustling palms, making it all even better. A school of lagoon fish, attacked by something, jumped in a shower of blue-green sparks. Close by, there was a sudden crash in the brush.

“What was that?” she murmured.

“Coconut. Remember that, when we’re walking in the grove.”

For a week they stayed. They were more alone here than they had been in mid-ocean, with none of the strains and the worries. They wore no clothes, answered no schedule. They walked the beach and snorkled the lagoon. They found an abandoned machete and Mitch sharpened it. They hacked clumsily at coconuts and drank the coconut-water and stuffed themselves on the meat. They crossed the narrow necklace of land to the sea and waded out on the reef. Even here they were protected from the thundering surf by 100 yards of shallow coral, the top of an underwater wall probably a full mile deep. They played with a baby shark stranded in a coral pocket, and finally flipped him free into a tidal rivulet.

They learned to eat pauah, abalone-like creatures with encrusted shells and vivid lips of green or purple or orange. They pried them off the bottom with diving knives and squatted on the boomkin slicing off the lips, which they marinated in canned lemon juice and ate raw.

They swam and dozed and ate and made love. Mitch had, somehow, got back the touch. To ask him why, she would have had to admit that she had missed it, so she did not. Why rock the boat?

At anchor they always slept in the forward bunks. She would awaken at dawn and watch a tall, friendly palm which hung over the bow, tracing cabalistic signs above the hatch in the rising morning breeze.

The rustle of the trades never stopped, day or night. The surf drummed endlessly. Every few hours a coconut crashed in the brush. The weather was changeless: a cool morning, a searing noon, a squall after lunch, a sunset of purple and gold. They saw only three people all week: a man, a woman, and a tiny baby, far across the lagoon, droning along in an outrigger with an outboard motor. She waved and the man waved back.

She wanted to stay forever. She had only two worries: fresh water and Mitch. They had been afraid, after her fever, of Marquesas spring-water. So they had simply bought enough bottled Vichy from Henri to reach Tahiti. Very soon, they would have to fill their tanks. And very soon, she was sure, Mitch would get bored.