It came, at first, gently, but from the very start it made me realise the unpleasant loneliness of our situation, our remote isolation in this wilderness of sea and rock, and how the islands in this tideless Baltic ocean lay about us like the advance guard of a vast besieging army.  Its entry, as I say, was gentle, hardly noticeable, in fact, to most of us:  singularly undramatic it certainly was.  But, then, in actual life this is often the way the dreadful climaxes move upon us, leaving the heart undisturbed almost to the last minute, and then overwhelming it with a sudden rush of horror.  For it was the custom at breakfast to listen patiently while each in turn related the trivial adventures of the night—­how they slept, whether the wind shook their tent, whether the spider on the ridge pole had moved, whether they had heard the toad, and so forth—­and on this particular morning Joan, in the middle of a little pause, made a truly novel announcement: 

“In the night I heard the howling of a dog,” she said, and then flushed up to the roots of her hair when we burst out laughing.  For the idea of there being a dog on this forsaken island that was only able to support a snake and two toads was distinctly ludicrous, and I remember Maloney, half-way through his burnt porridge, capping the announcement by declaring that he had heard a “Baltic turtle” in the lagoon, and his wife’s expression of frantic alarm before the laughter undeceived her.

But the next morning Joan repeated the story with additional and convincing detail.

“Sounds of whining and growling woke me,” she said, “and I distinctly heard sniffing under my tent, and the scratching of paws.”

“Oh, Timothy!  Can it be a porcupine?” exclaimed the Bo’sun’s Mate with distress, forgetting that Sweden was not Canada.

But the girl’s voice had sounded to me in quite another key, and looking up I saw that her father and Sangree were staring at her hard.  They, too, understood that she was in earnest, and had been struck by the serious note in her voice.

“Rubbish, Joan!  You are always dreaming something or other wild,” her father said a little impatiently.

“There’s not an animal of any size on the whole island,” added Sangree with a puzzled expression.  He never took his eyes from her face.

“But there’s nothing to prevent one swimming over,” I put in briskly, for somehow a sense of uneasiness that was not pleasant had woven itself into the talk and pauses.  “A deer, for instance, might easily land in the night and take a look round—­”

“Or a bear!” gasped the Bo’sun’s Mate, with a look so portentous that we all welcomed the laugh.

But Joan did not laugh.  Instead, she sprang up and called to us to follow.

“There,” she said, pointing to the ground by her tent on the side farthest from her mother’s; “there are the marks close to my head.  You can see for yourselves.”