bound to come back to him.  We had only to wait and catch the solid grains that now and then fell in the winnowing of that unending stream of chaff.  It was a tedious and exasperating process, but it had its compensations.  At times Leavitt could be as uncannily brilliant as he was dull and boresome.  The conviction grew upon me that he had become a little demented, as if his brain had been tainted by the sulphurous fumes exhaled by the smoking crater above his head.  His mind smoked, flickered, and flared like an unsteady lamp, blown upon by choking gases, in which the oil had run low.

But of the wanderer Farquharson he spoke with precision and authority, for he had shared with Farquharson his bungalow there in Muloa—­a period of about six months, it seemed—­and there Farquharson had contracted a tropic fever and died.

“Well, at last we have got all the facts,” Major Stanleigh sighed with satisfaction when the Sylph was heading back to Port Charlotte.  Muloa, lying astern, we were no longer watching.  Leavitt, at the water’s edge, had waved us a last good-by and had then abruptly turned back into the forest, very likely to go clambering like a demented goat up the flanks of his beloved volcano and to resume poking about in its steaming fissures—­an occupation of which he never tired.

“The evidence is conclusive, don’t you think?—­the grave, Farquharson’s personal effects, those pages of the poor devil’s diary.”

I nodded assent.  In my capacity as owner of the Sylph I had merely undertaken to furnish Major Stanleigh with passage to Muloa and back, but the events of the last three days had made me a party to the many conferences, and I was now on terms of something like intimacy with the rather stiff and pompous English gentleman.  How far I was from sharing his real confidence I was to discover later when Eleanor Stanleigh gave me hers.

“My wife and niece will be much relieved to hear all this—­a family matter, you understand, Mr. Barnaby,” he had said to me when we landed.  “I should like to present you to them before we leave Port Charlotte for home.”

But, as it turned out, it was Eleanor Stanleigh who presented herself, coming upon me quite unexpectedly that night after our return while I sat smoking in the shadowy garden of the Marine Hotel.  I had dined with the major, after he had explained that the ladies were worn out by the heat and general developments of the day and had begged to be excused.  And I was frankly glad not to have to endure another discussion of the deceased Farquharson, of which I was heartily tired after hearing little else for the last three days.  I could not help wondering how the verbose and pompous major had paraphrased and condensed that inchoate mass of biography and reminiscence into an orderly account for his wife and niece.  He had doubtless devoted the whole afternoon to it.  Sitting under the cool green of the lemon-trees, beneath a sky powdered with stars, I reflected that I, at least, was done with Farquharson forever.  But I was not, for just then Eleanor Stanleigh appeared before me.