to the FLUTTERBY.  More curious still was the circumstance that nobody, save the owner and certain bearded venerables of the crew, had ever been known to land on the island.  How about the other passengers?  Who were they?  The millionaire never so much as mentioned their existence.  It was surmised, accordingly, that he voyaged over the seas with a bevy of light-hearted nymphs; a disreputable mode of conduct for a man of his advanced years, and all the more aggravating to other people since, like a crafty and jealous old sultan, he screened them from public view.  Impropriety could be overlooked—­it could pass, where a millionaire was concerned, under the heading of unconventionality; but such glaring selfishness might end in being fatal to his reputation.

Confirmatory evidence of this scandalous state of affairs was obtained, one sunny morning, in the most unexpected fashion.  A fisherman named Luigi, paddling about the stern of the FLUTTERBY where, in consequence of the kitchen refuse thrown overboard, marine beasts of every shape and kind were wont to congregate, cast down his spear at what looked like a splendid caerulean flat-fish of uncommon size and brilliance.  The creature shivered and collapsed at that contact in the most unnatural, unfishlike manner; and Luigi drew up, to his amazement, a fragment of a lady’s dress—­to wit, a short length of sky-blue crepe de Chine.  Bitterly disappointed, he nevertheless took the matter with the characteristic Southern philosophy.  “This will do for my little Annarella,” he decided.  And doubtless the child, arrayed in these celestial tints, would have been the envy of all her girl companions at the next festival of the patron saint b for the fact that Mr. Freddy Parker was strolling on the beach at the very moment of the man’s return to land.  By a rare piece of good luck, as he himself phrased it, his eye fell upon the dripping fabric; by a stroke of intuition not rare but unique, he divined its worth as a sociological document.  Promising the man a reasonable sum of money (the Commissioner happened to have no loose change in his pocket just then) he carried the incrimination morsel in triumph to the Residency, where it was displayed by his lady, to all and sundry, in corroboration of her theory.

“That settles it,” she used to say.  “Unless indeed he dresses up his cabin-boy as a girl, and in that case . . .”

Mr. Heard, reposing on the rough pumiceous ground with his eye fixed upon the naughty FLUTTERBY whose virginal whiteness, with declining day, had assumed a tell-tale crimson blush, pieced together these and sundry other little bits of information.  They made him more than usually thoughtful; they chimed in with his momentary mood of self-analysis.