lt, even if we find it--"

"You don't doubt its existence?"

"I do not, ma'am. I doubt it so little, ma'am, that I would ten
times sooner engage to find than to fetch it. But I don't even
despair of fetching it, if the lady goes on being as clever as she
has begun."

"What?" exclaimed Plinny. "I? Clever?"

"Yes, indeed, ma'am," Captain Branscome answered, still in a slow,
measured voice. "But, indeed, too, I might have been prepared for it
when you started by taking a line that beats all my experience of
landsmen; or perhaps in this case I ought to say lands_ladies_."

"Why, what have I done that is wonderful?"

"You took the line, ma'am, that, from here to Honduras, what is it
but a passage? A few months at the most--oh, to be sure, to a seaman
that's no more than nature; but to hear it from any one land-bred,
and a lady too! As a Christian man, I have believed in miracles,
but to-day I seem to be moving among them. And after your saying
_that_, I had no call to be surprised when you up and suggested a way
that would have taken a seaman twenty years to hit upon! I am not
talking about the ship, ma'am. That part of your plan (if you'll
allow me, as a seaman, to give an opinion) won't work at all.
But the plan in general is a masterpiece."

"But I do not see," Plinny confessed, with a small puckering of the
brows, "that I have suggested anything that can be called a plan."

"Why, ma'am, you have been talking heavenliest common sense, and once
you've started us upon common sense there's no such thing as a
difficulty. 'Let us go to the island,' you said; and with that at a
stroke you get rid of the worst danger we have to fear, which is
suspicion. For who's to suspect such a company as this present, or
any part of it, of being after treasure? 'Let us make it a pleasure
trip,' said you, or words to that effect; and what follows but that
the whole journey is made cheap and simple? We book our passages in
the Kingston packet. Peace has been declared with France, and what
more natural than that a party of English should be travelling to see
the West Indies? Or what more likely than that, after what has
happened, the doctor has advised a sea-voyage, to soothe your mind?
As for me, I am Harry's tutor; every one in Falmouth knows it, and
thinks me lucky to get the billet. It won't take five minutes to
explain Mr. Goodfellow here, just as easily--"

"And as for me," struck in Miss Belcher, "I'm an old ma