have any blacklegs about her house.
Ruth Bellenden's too clever for that. She'd send them about their
business quick enough, as she's sent many a one when I was the skipper
of her yacht. Did they tell you that, Dolly--that your skipper used to
sail the smartest schooner-yacht that ever flew the ensign----"

The boy looked up at me and admitted frankly that he knew something.

"They said the young lady owned the Manhattan, sir. I never asked much,
about it. The men were fond of her, I believe."

"Adored her, lad. She was the daughter of Rupert Bellenden, who made a
mint of money by building the Western American Railroad, and afterwards
in the steel way. He was drowned at sea when the Elbe went down. His
son got the business, but the daughter took the house and fortune--at
least, the best part of it. She was always a rare one for the sea, and
owned a biggish boat in her father's time. When he died she bought the
Manhattan, more's the pity, for it carried her to Mediterranean ports,
and there she took up with the fiddler. He was a Chevalier or
something, and could look a woman through and through. What money he
had was made, the Lord knows where, not out of fiddling, I'll be bound,
for his was no music to set the tongue lilting. He'd been in the
Pacific a while, they say, and was a Jack-of-all-trades in America.
That's how he came across these islands, you may imagine--slap in the
sea-way to Yokohama as they are. There's been many a good ship ashore
on Ken's Island, lad, believe me, and there'll be many another. 'Tis no
likely place to bring a young wife to, and none but a madman would have
done it."

I told him all this just in a natural way, as one man speaking to
another of something which troubled his mind. Not that he made much of
it--how should he?--for there were a hundred things to look at, and his
eyes were here and there and everywhere; now up at the great black
rocks above us; now peering into a deep gorge, over which a little
wooden bridge carried us, just for all the world like a scaffold thrown
from tree to tree of the wood. It was a rare picture, I admit, and when
we came out of the thicket at last and saw the lower island spread
before us like a chart, with its fields of crimson flowers, its
waterfalls, its bits of pasture, and its blue seas beyond, a man might
well have stood to tell himself that Nature never made a fairer place.
For my part, I began to believe again that Edmond Czerny knew what he
was