Page:Temple Bailey--The Gay cockade.djvu/285

 Yet she didn't really tell us anything. She ate and ate, and it was the prettiest thing to see her. She was dainty and young and eager like a child at a party.

"How good everything is!" she said, at last with a sigh. "I don't think I was ever so hungry in my life."

Billy and I didn't eat much. You see we were too interested, and besides we had had our dinner.

As I have said, she didn't really tell us anything. "It was an accident, and I came up here. And the old clock that you heard strike belonged to my grandfather. He was an admiral, and it was his clock. I used to listen to it as a child."

"What happened to the rest?" Billy asked, bluntly. He was more concerned about the automobile accident than about her ancestors.

"Oh, do you mean the others in the car?" she came reluctantly back from the admiral and his ship's clock. "I am sure I don't know. And I am very sure that I don't care."

"But were any of them killed?"

"No—they are all alive—but you see—it was a shipwreck—and I floated away—by myself—and this is my island, and you are the nice friendly savages" she touched Billy on the arm. He drew away a bit. I knew that he was afraid she 279