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297 in sudden alarm, but the winning smile banished all suspicions. "Do you live on the island?"

He avoided a direct answer to this.

"I have lived in many places—but tell me, if I may ask, why you are looking for gold here. It is not the likeliest place for a mine."

"Those awful skeletons on the trail, and the chart on the stone in the cavern, gave us the clue. It seems silly, perfectly idiotic, to believe it, but, as Spanish Dick says and as you told me just now, so many odd things happen here. It's just fun to hunt for it—just a lark, you see. And anyway there's too much prose in the world, so I'm going to take the poetry when I find it. This was what was on it—the stone," and she traced what she could remember of the markings in the sand. "I'm not sure whether it was M or N, though.

"I don't want the gold for myself," she went on, "though it would be nice to have if there is any of course there isn't, but if there is—" (he smiled at her prettily-mixed sentences) "it would be fine for Ben—Mr. Boltwood after all he's stood. He could have his own ship then. Just imagine it—he was here almost a year and a half. That was hard wasn't it?"

"Yes, that must have been pretty hard here—all alone."

Then shyly she ventured, for she already felt quite at home with this well-bred stranger in the carefully mended clothes, which she correctly surmised were about all he possessed in the world:

"I'm an American and I live in Salthaven, way up north in Massachusetts. My name is Sally Fell."