“Let me aboard!  I must come aboard!” I cried.

Other faces appeared, then a rope-ladder.  Somehow I was mounting it—­a dizzy feat to which only the tumult of my emotions made me indifferent.  Bare brawny arms of sailors clutched at me and drew me to the deck.  There at once I was the center of a circle of speechless and astonished persons, all men but one.

“Well?” demanded a large breezy voice.  “What’s this mean?  What do you want aboard my ship?”

I looked up at a red-faced man in a large straw hat.

“I want my aunt,” I explained.

“Your aunt?” he roared.  “Why the devil should you think I’ve got your aunt?”

“You have got her,” I replied with firmness.  “I don’t see her, but she’s here somewhere.”

The captain of the Rufus Smith shook two large red fists above his head.

“Another lunatic!” he shouted.  “I’d as soon have a white horse and a minister aboard as to go to sea in a floating bedlam!”

As the captain’s angry thunder died away came the small anxious voice of Aunt Jane.

“What’s the matter?  Oh, please tell me what’s the matter!” she was saying as she edged her way into the group.  In her severely cut khaki suit she looked like a plump little dumpling that had got into a sausage wrapping by mistake.  Her eyes, round, pale, blinking a little in the tropical glare, roved over the circle until they lit on me.  Right where she stood Aunt Jane petrified.  She endeavored to shriek, but achieved instead only a strangled wheeze.  Her poor little chin dropped until it disappeared altogether in the folds of her plump neck, and she remained speechless, stricken, immobile as a wax figure in an exhibition.

“Aunt Jane,” I said, “you must come right back to shore with me.”  I spoke calmly, for unless you are perfectly calm with Aunt Jane you fluster her.

She replied only by a slight gobbling in her throat, but the other woman spoke in a loud voice, addressed not to me but to the universe in general.

“The Young Person is mad!” It was an unmistakably British intonation.

This then was Miss Violet Higglesby-Browne, I saw a grim, bony, stocky shape, in a companion costume to my aunt’s.  Around the edges of her cork helmet her short iron-gray hair visibly bristled.  She had a massive head, and a seamed and rugged countenance which did its best to live down the humiliation of a ridiculous little nose with no bridge.  By what prophetic irony she had been named Violet is the secret of those powers which seem to love a laugh at mankind’s expense.

But what riveted my eyes was the deadly glare with which hers were turned on me.  I saw that not only was she as certain of my identity as though she had guided me from my first tottering steps, but that in a flash she had grasped my motives, aims and purposes, and meant once for all to face, out-general and defeat me with great slaughter.