Aunt Jane turned upon him her round innocent eyes.

“Oh, no, Mr. Tubbs,” she assured him, “I don’t think a single one of them was named Benjy!”

The laughter which followed this gave me time to get myself in hand again.

“Crusoe it is and will be,” I asserted.  “Like Great-Grandmother Harding, I don’t approve of changeableness.  It happens that a girl I know at home has a dog named Benjy.”  Which happened fortunately to be true, for otherwise I should have been obliged to invent it.  But the girl is a cat, and the dog a miserable little high-bred something, all shivers and no hair.  I should never have thought of him in the same breath with Crusoe.

That evening Mr. Shaw addressed the gathering at the camp-fire—­which we made small and bright, and then sat well away from because of the heat—­and in a few words gave it as his opinion that any further search in the cave under the point was useless.  (If he had known the strange confirmatory echo which this awoke in my mind!) He proposed that the shore of the island to a reasonable distance on either side of the bay-entrance should be surveyed, with a view to discover whether some other cave did not exist which would answer the description given by the dying Hopperdown as well as that first explored.

Mr. Shaw’s words were addressed to the ladies, the organizer and financier, respectively, of the expedition, to the very deliberate exclusion of Mr. Tubbs.  But he might as well have made up his mind to recognize the triumvirate.  Enthroned on a camp-chair sat Aunt Jane, like a little goddess of the Dollar Sign, and on one hand Mr. Tubbs smiled blandly, and on the other Violet gloomed.  You saw that in secret council Mr. Shaw’s announcement had been foreseen and deliberated upon.

Mr. Tubbs, who understood very well the role of power behind the throne, left it to Violet to reply.  And Miss Browne, who carried an invisible rostrum with her wherever she went, now alertly mounted it.

“My friends,” she began, “those dwelling on a plane where the Material is all may fail to grasp the thought which I shall put before you this evening.  They may not understand that if a different psychic atmosphere had existed on this island from the first we should not now be gazing into a blank wall of Doubt.  My friends, this expedition was, so to speak, called from the Void by Thought.  Thought it was, as realized in steamships and other ephemeral forms, which bore us thither over rolling seas.  How then can it be otherwise than that Thought should influence our fortunes—­that success should be unable to materialize before a persistent attitude of Negation?  My friends, you will perceive that there is no break in this sequence of ideas; all is remorseless logic.

“In order to withdraw myself from this atmosphere of Negation, for these several days past I have sought seclusion.  There in silence I have asserted the power of Positive over Negative Thought, gazing meanwhile into the profound depths of the All.  My friends, an answer has been vouchsafed us; I have had a vision of that for which we seek.  Now at last, in a spirit of glad confidence, we may advance.  For, my friends, the chest is buried—­in sand.”