Ventnor, you have met Mr. Anstruther before."

The sailor shook hands. Lord Ventnor smiled affably.

"Your enforced residence on the island seems to have agreed with you,"
he said.

"Admirably. Life here had its drawbacks, but we fought our enemies in
the open. Didn't we, Iris?"

"Yes, dear. The poor Dyaks were not sufficiently modernized to attack
us with false testimony."

His lordship's sallow face wrinkled somewhat. So Iris knew of the
court-martial, nor was she afraid to proclaim to all the world that
this man was her lover. As for Captain Fitzroy, his bushy eyebrows
disappeared into his peaked cap when he heard the manner of their
speech.

Nevertheless Ventnor smiled again.

"Even the Dyaks respected Miss Deane," he said.

But Anstruther, sorry for the manifest uneasiness of the shipowner,
repressed the retort on his lips, and forthwith suggested that they
should walk to the north beach in the first instance, that being the
scene of the wreck.

During the next hour he became auditor rather than narrator. It was
Iris who told of his wild fight against wind and waves, Iris who showed
them where he fought with the devil-fish, Iris who expatiated on the
long days of ceaseless toil, his dauntless courage in the face of every
difficulty, the way in which he rescued her from the clutch of the
savages, the skill of his preparations against the anticipated attack,
and the last great achievement of all, when, time after time, he foiled
the Dyaks' best-laid plans, and flung them off, crippled and
disheartened, during the many phases of the thirty hours' battle.

She had an attentive audience. Most of the _Orient's_ officers
quietly came up and followed the girl's glowing recital with breathless
interest. Robert vainly endeavored more than once to laugh away her
thrilling eulogy. But she would have none of it. Her heart was in her
words. He deserved this tribute of praise, unstinted, unmeasured,
abundant in its simple truth, yet sounding like a legend spun by some
romantic poet, were not the grim evidences of its accuracy visible on
every hand.

She was so volubly clear, so precise in fact, so subtle in her clever
delineations of humorous or tragic events, that her father was
astounded, and even Anstruther silently admitted that a man might live
until he equaled the years of a Biblical patriarch without discovering
all the resources of a woman.

There were tears in her eyes when she ended; but they were tears