Her shoulders lifted and a little shiver went over her.

“But even a blank like that can become unendurable.  To be always dragging at a chain, and not knowing where it leads to....”  Her hand slipped from the gold cross on her breast and fell to the other in her lap, which it clutched tightly.  “Four years....  I tried to make myself believe that he was gone forever—­was dead.  It was wicked of me.”

My murmur of polite dissent led her to repeat her words.

“Yes, and even worse than that.  During the past month I have actually prayed that he might be dead....  I shall be punished for it.”

I ventured no rejoinder to these words of self-condemnation.  Joyce, I reflected, mundanely, had clearly swept her off her feet in the ardour of their first meeting and instant love.

“It must be a great relief to you,” I murmured at length, “to have it all definitely settled at last.”

“If I could only feel that it was!”

I turned in amazement, to see her leaning a little forward, her hands still tightly clasped in her lap, and her eyes fixed upon the distant horizon where the red spark of Lakalatcha’s stertorous breathing flamed and died away.  Her breast rose and fell, as if timed to the throbbing of that distant flare.  “I want you to take me to that island—­to-morrow.”

“Why, surely, Miss Stanleigh,” I burst forth, “there can’t be any reasonable doubt.  Leavitt’s mind may be a little flighty—­he may have embroidered his story with a few gratuitous details; but Farquharson’s books and things—­the material evidence of his having lived there—­”

“And having died there?”

“Surely Leavitt wouldn’t have fabricated that!  If you had talked with him—­”

“I should not care to talk with Mr. Leavitt,” Miss Stanleigh cut me short.  “I want only to go and see—­if he is Mr. Leavitt.”

“If he is Mr. Leavitt!” For a moment I was mystified, and then in a sudden flash I understood.  “But that’s pre-posterous—­impossible!”

I tried to conceive of Leavitt in so monstrous a role, tried to imagine the missing Farquharson still in the flesh and beguiling Major Stanleigh and myself with so outlandish a story, devising all that ingenious detail to trick us into a belief in his own death.  It would indeed have argued a warped mind, guided by some unfathomable purpose.

“I devoutly hope you are right,” Miss Stanleigh was saying, with deliberation.  “But it is not preposterous, and it is not impossible—­if you had known Mr. Farquharson as I have.”

It was a discreet confession.  She wished me to understand—­without the necessity of words.  My surmise was that she had met and married Farquharson, whoever he was, under the spell of some momentary infatuation, and that he had proved himself to be an unspeakable brute whom she had speedily abandoned.

“I am determined to go to Muloa, Mr. Barnaby,” she announced, with decision.  “I want you to make the arrangements, and with as much secrecy as possible.  I shall ask my aunt to go with me.”