Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/308

296 ful old lady on the bed of flowers recurred to her. She wondered but his question had not yet been answered.

"Yes, they all belong to one party. The tall good-looking man with the beard is Captain Brent. He's the Captain of the ship in which we came."

"Why did you come here, Mademoiselle? It is the back-stairs of the world, the jumping-off place, the springboard from which one leaps into a sea of oblivion or disaster."

"We came to find a castaway. It sounds like a fairy tale, but it's all true. The message came in a bottle from a boy we knew."

"No, it is not strange, for one who has sailed these seas and lived on this island knows that many things happen that the rest of the world would shake their heads at— And so the message in the bottle came from him—the young man I saw climbing the mountain?"

Again the quizzical expression and, startled, Sally asked:

"Yes, but how did you know?"

She flushed, and he, to spare her embarrassment, turned away, which was rather chivalrous and Spartan, with two wild roses blooming so suddenly and bewitchingly in the brown fields of her cheeks.

"When one has roved the world many years, he learns to read the human heart, and to put two and two together—or one and one—very quickly."

He looked at the toiling sailors again.

"And so they are digging for gold?"

"You guessed that, too—who are you, anyway?" she asked