he sensitive Davidson. The girl must have been miserable
indeed to follow such a strange man to such a spot. Heyst had, no doubt,
told her the truth. He was a gentleman. But no words could do justice to
the conditions of life on Samburan. A desert island was nothing to it.
Moreover, when you were cast away on a desert island--why, you could not
help yourself; but to expect a fiddle-playing girl out of an ambulant
ladies' orchestra to remain content there for a day, for one single day,
was inconceivable. She would be frightened at the first sight of it. She
would scream.

The capacity for sympathy in these stout, placid men! Davidson was
stirred to the depths; and it was easy to see that it was about Heyst
that he was concerned. We asked him if he had passed that way lately.

"Oh, yes. I always do--about half a mile off."

"Seen anybody about?"

"No, not a soul. Not a shadow."

"Did you blow your whistle?"

"Blow the whistle? You think I would do such a thing?"

He rejected the mere possibility of such an unwarrantable intrusion.
Wonderfully delicate fellow, Davidson!

"Well, but how do you know that they are there?" he was naturally asked.

Heyst had entrusted Mrs. Schomberg with a message for Davidson--a few
lines in pencil on a scrap of crumpled paper. It was to the effect: that
an unforeseen necessity was driving him away before the appointed time.
He begged Davidson's indulgence for the apparent discourtesy. The woman
of the house--meaning Mrs. Schomberg--would give him the facts, though
unable to explain them, of course.

"What was there to explain?" wondered Davidson dubiously.

"He took a fancy to that fiddle-playing girl, and--"

"And she to him, apparently," I suggested.

"Wonderfully quick work," reflected Davidson. "What do you think will
come of it?"

"Repentance, I should say. But how is it that Mrs. Schomberg has been
selected for a confidante?"

For indeed a waxwork figure would have seemed more useful than that
woman whom we all were accustomed to see sitting elevated above the two
billiard-tables--without expression, without movement, without voice,
without sight.

"Why, she helped the girl to bolt," said Davidson turning at me his
innocent eyes, rounded by the state of constant amazement in which
this affair had left him, like those shocks of terror or sorrow which
sometimes leave their victim afflicted by nervous trembling. It looked
as though he would never get over it.

"Mrs. S