“Coelum non animum mutant, qui trans mare currant,” he thought.  By a queer trick of memory he could recall the very page in Horace where this philosophical line occurs.  It was in the eleventh epistle of the first book.  A smile illumined his tired face.

Iris was watchful.  She had never in her life cooked even a potato or boiled an egg.  The ham was her first attempt.

“My cooking amuses you?” she demanded suspiciously.

“It gratifies every sense,” he murmured.  “There is but one thing needful to complete my happiness.”

“And that is?”

“Permission to smoke.”

“Smoke what?”

He produced a steel box, tightly closed, and a pipe, “I will answer you in Byron’s words,” he said—­

  “’Sublime tobacco! which from east to west
  Cheers the tar’s labour or the Turkman’s rest.’”

“Your pockets are absolute shops,” said the girl, delighted that his temper had improved.  “What other stores do you carry about with you?”

He lit his pipe and solemnly gave an inventory of his worldly goods.  Beyond the items she had previously seen he could only enumerate a silver dollar, a very soiled and crumpled handkerchief, and a bit of tin.  A box of Norwegian matches he threw away as useless, but Iris recovered them.

“You never know what purpose they may serve,” she said.  In after days a weird significance was attached to this simple phrase.

“Why do you carry about a bit of tin?” she went on.

How the atmosphere of deception clung to him!  Here was a man compelled to lie outrageously who, in happier years, had prided himself on scrupulous accuracy even in small things.

“Plague upon it!” he silently protested.  “Subterfuge and deceit are as much at home in this deserted island as in Mayfair.”

“I found it here, Miss Deane,” he answered.

Luckily she interpreted “here” as applying to the cave.

“Let me see it.  May I?”

He handed it to her.  She could make nothing of it, so together they puzzled over it.  The sailor rubbed it with a mixture of kerosene and sand.  Then figures and letters and a sort of diagram were revealed.  At last they became decipherable.  By exercising patient ingenuity some one had indented the metal with a sharp punch until the marks assumed this aspect (see cut, following page).

Iris was quick-witted.  “It is a plan of the island,” she cried.

“Also the latitude and the longitude.”

“What does ‘J.S.’ mean?”

“Probably the initials of a man’s name; let us say John Smith, for instance.”

“And the figures on the island, with the ‘X’ and the dot?”

“I cannot tell you at present,” he said.  “I take it that the line across the island signifies this gap or canyon, and the small intersecting line the cave.  But 32 divided by 1, and an ‘X’ surmounted by a dot are cabalistic.  They would cause even Sherlock Holmes to smoke at least two pipes.  I have barely started one.”