“Oh.  How did you like it?”

“It’s a splendid picture.  I’m not sure it will interest others as much as ourselves, yet the people present seemed to like it.”

“Well it was their last chance to observe my desperate peril and my heroic rescue,” said the boy.  “The picture will not be shown after to-night.”

“Why not?” they asked, in surprise.

“I bought the thing this afternoon.  It didn’t seem to me quite modest to exploit our little adventure in public.”

This was a new phase of the strange boy’s character and the girls did not know whether to approve it or not.

“It must have cost you something!” remarked Flo, the irrepressible.  “Besides, how could you do it while you were asleep?”

“Why, I wakened long enough to use the telephone,” he replied with a smile.  “There are more wonderful inventions in the world than motion pictures, you know.”

“But you like motion pictures, don’t you?” asked Maud, wondering why he had suppressed the film in question.

“Very much.  In fact, I am more interested in them than in anything else, not excepting the telephone—­which makes Aladdin’s lamp look like a firefly in the sunshine.”

“I suppose,” said Flo, staring into his face with curious interest, “that you will introduce motion pictures into your island of Sangoa, when you return?”

“I suppose so,” he answered, a little absently.  “I had not considered that seriously, as yet, but my people would appreciate such a treat, I’m sure.”

This speech seemed to destroy, in a manner, their shrewd conjecture that he was in America to purchase large quantities of films.  Why, then, should Goldstein have paid such abject deference to this unknown islander?

In his own room, after the party had separated for the night, Mr. Merrick remarked to Arthur Weldon as they sat smoking their cigars: 

“Young Jones is evidently possessed of some means.”

“So it seems,” replied Arthur.  “Perhaps his father, the scientific recluse, had accumulated some money, and the boy came to America to get rid of it.  He will be extravagant and wasteful for awhile, and then go back to his island with the idea that he has seen the world.”

Uncle John nodded.

“He is a rather clean-cut young fellow,” said he, “and the chances are he won’t become dissipated, even though he loses his money through lack of worldly knowledge or business experience.  A boy brought up and educated on an island can’t be expected to prove very shrewd, and whatever the extent of his fortune it is liable to melt like snow in the sunshine.”

“After all,” returned Arthur, “this experience won’t hurt him.  He will still have his island to return to.”

They smoked for a time in silence.

“Has it ever occurred to you, sir,” said Arthur, “that the story Jones has related to us, meager though it is, bears somewhat the stamp of a fairy tale?”