“Aged Man!” She laughed, as though glad of this turn.  “I like you better in prose.  Go on, please, where we left off.  What did you do then?”

Heywood’s smile, half earnest, half mischievous, obediently faded.

“Oh, that!  Why, then, of course, I discharged Rudolph’s gatekeeper, put a trusty of my own in his place, sent out to hire a diver, and turned all hands to hunting.  ‘Obviously,’ as Gilly would say.—­We picked up two side-bolts in the garden, by the wall, one in the mud outside, and three the diver got in shallow water.  Total recovered, six; plus two Peng had no time for, eight.  We can ill spare four guns, though; and the affair shows they keep a beastly close watch.”

“Yes,” said Miss Drake, absently; then drew a slow breath.  “Peng was the most promising pupil we had.”

“He was,” stated her companion, “a little, unmitigated, skipping, orange-tawny goblin!”

She made no reply.  As they footed slowly along the winding path, Flounce, the fox-terrier, who had scouted among strange clumps of bamboo, now rejoined them briskly, cantering with her fore-legs delicately stiff and joyful.  Miss Drake stooped to pat her, saying:—­

“Poor little dog.  Little Foreign Dog!” She rose with a sigh, to add incongruously, “Oh, the things we dream beforehand, and then the things that happen!”

“I don’t know.”  Heywood looked at her keenly.  “Sometimes they’re the same.”

The jealous terrier scored her dusty paws down his white drill, from knee to ankle, before he added:—­

“You know how the Queen of Heaven won her divinity.”

“Another,” said the girl, “of your heathen stories?”

“Rather a pretty one,” he retorted.  “It happened in a seaport, a good many hundred miles up the coast.  A poor girl lived there, with her mother, in a hut.  One night a great gale blew, so that everybody was anxious.  Three junks were out somewhere at sea, in that storm.  The girl lay there in the dark.  Her sweetheart on board, it would be in a Western story; but these were only her friends, and kin, and townsmen, that were at stake.  So she lay there in the hut, you see, and couldn’t rest.  And then it seemed to her, in the dark, that she was swimming out through the storm, out and out, and not in the least afraid.  She had become larger, and more powerful, somehow, than the rain, or the dark, or the whole ocean; for when she came upon the junks tossing there, she took one in each hand, the third in her mouth, and began to swim for home.  Just retrieved ’em, you know.  But then across the storm she heard her mother calling in the dark, and had to open her mouth to answer.  So she lost that junk.”

“Well, then her spirit was back in the hut.  But next day the two junks came in; the third one, never.  And for that dream, she was made, after her death, the great and merciful Queen of Heaven.”

As Heywood ended, they were entering a pastoral village, near the town, but hidden low under great trees, ancient and widely gnarled.