chomberg jerked Heyst's note, twisted like a pipe-light, into my
lap while I sat there unsuspecting," Davidson went on. "Directly I had
recovered my senses, I asked her what on earth she had to do with it
that Heyst should leave it with her. And then, behaving like a painted
image rather than a live woman, she whispered, just loud enough for me
to hear:

"I helped them. I got her things together, tied them up in my own shawl,
and threw them into the compound out of a back window. I did it."

"That woman that you would say hadn't the pluck to lift her little
finger!" marvelled Davidson in his quiet, slightly panting voice. "What
do you think of that?"

I thought she must have had some interest of her own to serve. She was
too lifeless to be suspected of impulsive compassion. It was impossible
to think that Heyst had bribed her. Whatever means he had, he had
not the means to do that. Or could it be that she was moved by
that disinterested passion for delivering a woman to a man which in
respectable spheres is called matchmaking?--a highly irregular example
of it!

"It must have been a very small bundle," remarked Davidson further.

"I imagine the girl must have been specially attractive," I said.

"I don't know. She was miserable. I don't suppose it was more than
a little linen and a couple of those white frocks they wear on the
platform."

Davidson pursued his own train of thought. He supposed that such a thing
had never been heard of in the history of the tropics. For where could
you find anyone to steal a girl out of an orchestra? No doubt fellows
here and there took a fancy to some pretty one--but it was not for
running away with her. Oh dear no! It needed a lunatic like Heyst.

"Only think what it means," wheezed Davidson, imaginative under his
invincible placidity. "Just only try to think! Brooding alone on
Samburan has upset his brain. He never stopped to consider, or he
couldn't have done it. No sane man . . . How is a thing like that to go
on? What's he going to do with her in the end? It's madness."

"You say that he's mad. Schomberg tells us that he must be starving on
his island; so he may end yet by eating her," I suggested.

Mrs. Schomberg had had no time to enter into details, Davidson told us.
Indeed, the wonder was that they had been left alone so long. The
drowsy afternoon was slipping by. Footsteps and voices resounded on the
veranda--I beg pardon, the piazza; the scraping of chairs, the ping