Aunt Jane had been dreadfully alarmed by the pigs, and wanted to keep me immured in the cabin o’ nights so that I should not be eaten.  But nothing less than a Bengal tiger would have driven me to such extremity.

“Though if a pig should eat me,” I suggested, “you might mark him to avoid becoming a cannibal at second hand.  I should hate to think of you, Aunt Jane, as the family tomb!”

“Virginia, you are most unfeeling,” said Aunt Jane, getting pink about the eyelids.

“Ah, I didn’t know you Americans went in much for family tombs?” remarked the beautiful youth interestedly.

“No, we do our best to keep out of them,” I assured him, and he walked off meditatively revolving this.

If the beautiful youth had been beautiful on shipboard, in the informal costume he affected on the island he was more splendid still.  His white cotton shirt and trousers showed him lithe and lean and muscular.  His bared arms and chest were like cream solidified to flesh.  Instead of his nose peeling like common noses in the hot salt air, every kiss of the sun only gave his skin a warmer, richer glow.  With his striped silk sash of red and blue about his waist, and his crown of ambrosial chestnut curls—­a development due to the absence of a barber—­the Honorable Cuthbert would certainly have been hailed by the natives, if there had been any, as the island’s god.

Camp was made in the early hours of the day.  Then came luncheon, prepared with skill by Cookie, and eaten from a table of packing-cases laid in the shade.  Afterward every one, hot and weary, retired for a siesta.  It was now the cool as well as the dry season on the island, yet the heat of the sun at midday was terrific.  But the temperature brought us neither illness nor even any great degree of lassitude.  Always around the island blew the faint cooling breath of the sea.  No marsh or stagnant water bred insect pests or fever.  Every day while we were there the men worked hard, and grew lean and sun-browned, and thrived on it.  Every afternoon with unfailing regularity a light shower fell, but in twenty minutes it was over and the sun shone again, greedily lapping up the moisture that glittered on the leaves.  And forever the sea sang a low muttering bass to the faint threnody of the wind in the palms.

On this first day we gathered in the cool of the afternoon about our table of packing-boxes for an event which even I, whose role was that of skeptic, found exciting.  Miss Browne was at last to produce her map and reveal the secret of the island.  So far, except in general terms, she had imparted it to no one.  Everybody, in coming along, had been buying a pig in a poke—­though to be sure Aunt Jane had paid for it.  The Scotchman, Cuthbert Vane had told me incidentally, had insured himself against loss by demanding a retaining fee beforehand.  Somehow my opinion, both of his honesty and of his intelligence, had risen since I knew this.  As to Cuthbert Vane, he had come purely in a spirit of adventure, and had paid his own expenses from the start.