“Nonsense!  Your wife needs you, Browne.  Don’t you, Mrs. Browne?  There, now!  It will be all right, just as I said.  I daresay, Browne, that I wouldn’t have been above the folly that got the better of you.  Only—­” he hesitated for a minute—­“only, it couldn’t have happened to me if I had a wife as dear and as good and as pretty as the one you have.”

Browne was silent for a long time, his arm still about Drusilla’s shoulder.  At the end of the long hall he said with decision in his voice: 

“Chase, you may tell your clients that so far as I am concerned they may have the beastly island and everything that goes with it.  I’m through with it all.  I shall discharge Britt and——­”

“My dear boy, it’s most magnanimous of you,” cried Chase merrily.  “But I’m afraid you can’t decide the question in such an off-hand, degage manner.  Sleep over it.  I’ve come to the conclusion that it isn’t so much of a puzzle as to how you are to get the island as how to get off of it.  Take good care of him, Mrs. Browne.  Don’t let him talk.”

She held out her hand to him impulsively.  There was an unfathomable, unreadable look in her dark eyes.  As he gallantly lifted the cold fingers to his lips, she said, without taking her almost hungry gaze from his face: 

“Thank you, Mr. Chase.  I shall never forget you.”

He stood there looking after them as they went up the stairway, a puzzled expression in his face.  After a moment he shook his head and smiled vaguely as he said to himself: 

“I guess he’ll be a good boy from now on.”  But he wondered what it was that he had seen or felt in her sombre gaze.

In fifteen minutes he was sound asleep in his room, his long frame relaxed, his hands wide open in utter fatigue.  He dreamed of a Henner girl with Genevra’s brilliant face instead of the vague, greenish features that haunt the vision with their subtle mysticism.

He was awakened at noon by Selim, who obeyed his instructions to the minute.  The eager Arab rubbed the soreness and stiffness out of his master’s body with copious applications of alcohol.

“I’m sorry you awoke me, Selim,” said the master enigmatically.  Selim drew back, dismayed.  “You drove her away.”  Selim’s eyes blinked with bewilderment.  “I’m afraid she’ll never come back.”

“Excellency!” trembled on the lips of the mystified servant.

“Ah, me!” sighed the master resignedly.  “She smiled so divinely.  Henner girls never smile, do they, Selim?  Have you noticed that they are always pensive?  Perhaps you haven’t.  It doesn’t matter.  But this one smiled.  I say,” coming back to earth, “have they begun to distil the water?  I’ve got a frightful thirst.”

“Yes, excellency.  The Sahib Browne is at work.  One of the servants became sick to-day.  Now no one is drinking the water.  Baillo is bringing in ice from the storehouses and melting it, but the supply is not large.  Sahib Browne will not let them make any more ice at present.”  Nothing more was said until Chase was ready for his rolls and coffee.  Then Selim asked hesitatingly, “Excellency, what is a bounder?  Mr. Browne says——­”