The Blue Lagoon - A Romance Book II

He looked upon Koko as a friend, but when a friend of Koko's--a bird with an inquisitive mind and three red feathers in his tail--dropped in one day to inspect the newcomer, he resented the intrusion, and screamed.

He had a passion for flowers, or anything bright. He would laugh and shout when taken on the lagoon in the dinghy, and make as if to jump into the water to get at the bright-coloured corals below.

Ah me, we laugh at young mothers, and all the miraculous things they tell us about their babies! They see what we cannot see: the first unfolding of that mysterious flower, the mind.

One day they were out on the lagoon. Dick had been rowing; he had ceased, and was letting the boat drift for a bit. Emmeline was dancing the child on her knee, when it suddenly held out its arms to the oarsman and said: "Dick!"

The little word, so often heard and easily repeated, was its first word on earth.

A voice that had never spoken in the world before had spoken; and to hear his name thus mysteriously uttered by a being he has created is the sweetest and perhaps the saddest thing a man can ever know.

Dick took the child on his knee, and from that moment his love for it was more than his love for Emmeline or anything else on earth.