“It must have been the Island,” said the boy slowly.

“Wot Island?  Island’s a sort o’ place, but no place in partic’lar.”

“I don’t know . . .  It must have been the Island, though.”

“Now listen.  Did you ever ’appen to ’ear tell of ’Olmness?”

She asked it eagerly, watching his face.  But it gave no answer to her hopes.  His eyes were dreamy.  The word, if it struck at all on his hearing, struck dully.

“I don’t see that the name matters,” he said after a long pause, “so long as it’s the Island.  We ’re going there, and we shall find out all about it when we get to Stratford.”

“Shall we?” asked Tilda, considerably astonished.  “But why, in the world?”

“Because . . .  Didn’t you hear Mr. Mortimer say that Shakespeare was born there?”

“I did,” said Tilda. “‘Ow’s that goin’ to ’elp us?”

“I don’t know,” the boy confessed, dragging a book from his pocket.  It was a ragged copy of the “Globe” Shakespeare, lacking its covers and smeared with dirt and blacking.  “But he knows all about the Island.”

“So that,” said Tilda, “is what ’urt me in the night!  It made my ribs all sore.  I fergot the book, an’ thought you must be sufferin’ from some kind o’ growth; but didn’t like to arsk till I knew yer better—­ deformed folks bein’ mostly touchy about it.  When you stripped jus’ now, an’ nothin’ the matter, it puzzled me more’n ever.  ’Ere—­show me where ’e tells about it,” she demanded, taking the volume and opening it on her lap.

“It’s all at the beginning, and he calls it The Tempest . . .  But it will take you ever so long to find out.  There was a ship wrecked, with a wicked duke on board, and he thought his son was drowned, but really it was all brought about by magic . . .  In the book it’s mostly names and speeches, and you only pick up here and there what the Island was like.”

“But what makes you sure it’s your Island?”

“You wait till we get to Stratford and ask him,” said the boy, nodding, bright and confident.

“Arsk’oo?  Shakespeare?  Sakes alive, child!  Don’t yer know ’e’s been dead these ‘undreds o’ years?”

“Has he?” His face fell, but after a moment grew cheerful again.  “But that needn’t matter.  There must be heaps of people left to tell us about it.”

Tilda closed the book.  She had learnt a little, but had been disappointed in more.  She felt desperately sorry for the child with this craze in his head about an Island.  She had a suspicion that the memories he related were all mixed up with fictions from the play.  As she put it to herself, “’E don’t mean to kid, but ’e can’t ’elp ’isself.”  But there was one question she had omitted and must yet ask.

“You said, jus’ now, you used to play by the sea, somewheres beneath that line o’ white houses you was tellin’ of.  Well, you couldn’ a-got down there on your own, at that age—­could yer, now?  W’ich means you must a-been carried.”