Page:Barbour--Joan of the ilsand.djvu/223

Rh was smiling now. "You always did take everything as a joke. Oh, yes, I remember now, you did marry him, but you didn't last long. Pneumonia, or something of the kind, they told me."

The man ceased talking abruptly, and Joan drew the coverlet up a little higher over him. To stay there and listen to such intimate memories seemed to her terribly like eavesdropping, but she could not leave him unattended. During her long vigil, though, Joan obtained a certain degree of satisfaction in reflecting that it was some other man the girl with the greenish eyes had married.

Then, at times, Keith spoke more or less rationally about pearls, and particularly about the two large pearls. On one such occasion Joan was lying down in her own room, Chester having relieved her at her post. Keith spoke to himself rather than to some third person.

"They're worth a good deal," he was saying. "Funny thing to me that Trent didn't get any more like 'em, but they'd fetch enough to keep a man out of trouble for a while."

Chester leaned forward curiously. He had searched in every nook and corner of the house, including that room, for the missing pearls, without success, and had come to the conclusion that after removing them from the hole in the beam Keith must have deposited them somewhere out of doors.