“Then I do not like such beetles; I always hated them, but this latest variety is positively detestable.  Such nasty things ought to be kept in zoological gardens, and not turned loose.  Moreover, my tea will be boiled into spinach.”

Nevertheless, the tea, though minus sugar or milk, was grateful enough and particularly acceptable to the sailor, who entertained Iris with a disquisition on the many virtues of that marvelous beverage.  Curiously enough, the lifting of the veil upon the man’s earlier history made these two much better friends.  With more complete acquaintance there was far less tendency towards certain passages which, under ordinary conditions, could be construed as nothing else than downright flirtation.

They made the pleasing discovery that they could both sing.  There was hardly an opera in vogue that one or other did not know sufficiently well to be able to recall the chief musical numbers.  Iris had a sweet and sympathetic mezzo-soprano voice, Jenks an excellent baritone, and, to the secret amazement of the girl, he rendered one or two well-known Anglo-Indian barrack-room ditties with much humor.

This, then, was the mise-en-scene.

Iris, seated in the broken saloon-chair, which the sailor had firmly wedged into the sand for her accommodation, was attired in a close-fitting costume selected from the small store of garments so wisely preserved by Jenks.  She wore a pair of clumsy men’s boots several sizes too large for her.  Her hair was tied up in a gipsy knot on the back of her head, and the light of a cheerful log fire danced in her blue eyes.

Jenks, unshaven and ragged, squatted tailor wise near her.  Close at hand, on two sides, the shaggy walls of rock rose in solemn grandeur.  The neighboring trees, decked now in the sable livery of night, were dimly outlined against the deep misty blue of sea and sky or wholly merged in the shadow of the cliffs.

They lost themselves in the peaceful influences of the hour.  Shipwrecked, remote from human land, environed by dangers known or only conjectured, two solitary beings on a tiny island, thrown haphazard from the depths of the China Sea, this young couple, after passing unscathed through perils unknown even to the writers of melodrama, lifted up their voices in the sheer exuberance of good spirits and abounding vitality.

The girl was specially attracted by “The Buffalo Battery,” a rollicking lyric known to all Anglo-India from Peshawur to Tuticorin.  The air is the familiar one of the “Hen Convention,” and the opening verse runs in this wise: 

  I love to hear the sepoy with his bold and martial tread,
  And the thud of the galloping cavalry re-echoes through my head. 
  But sweeter far than any sound by mortal ever made
  Is the tramp of the Buffalo Battery a-going to parade.
    Chorus:  For it’s “Hainya! hainya! hainya! hainya!”
      Twist their tails