“I am glad of that,” I heard the doctor murmur under his breath, but so low that I only just caught the words, and Sangree missed them altogether, as evidently he was meant to do.

“And now,” he cried, getting on his feet and shaking himself with a characteristic gesture, as though to shake out the horror and the mystery, “let us leave the problem till to-morrow and enjoy this wind and sea and stars.  I’ve been living lately in the atmosphere of many people, and feel that I want to wash and be clean.  I propose a swim and then bed.  Who’ll second me?” And two minutes later we were all diving from the boat into cool, deep water, that reflected a thousand moons as the waves broke away from us in countless ripples.

We slept in blankets under the open sky, Sangree and I taking the outside places, and were up before sunrise to catch the dawn wind.  Helped by this early start we were half-way home by noon, and then the wind shifted to a few points behind us so that we fairly ran.  In and out among a thousand islands, down narrow channels where we lost the wind, out into open spaces where we had to take in a reef, racing along under a hot and cloudless sky, we flew through the very heart of the bewildering and lonely scenery.

“A real wilderness,” cried Dr. Silence from his seat in the bows where he held the jib sheet.  His hat was off, his hair tumbled in the wind, and his lean brown face gave him the touch of an Oriental.  Presently he changed places with Sangree, and came down to talk with me by the tiller.

“A wonderful region, all this world of islands,” he said, waving his hand to the scenery rushing past us, “but doesn’t it strike you there’s something lacking?”

“It’s—­hard,” I answered, after a moment’s reflection.  “It has a superficial, glittering prettiness, without—­” I hesitated to find the word I wanted.

John Silence nodded his head with approval.

“Exactly,” he said.  “The picturesqueness of stage scenery that is not real, not alive.  It’s like a landscape by a clever painter, yet without true imagination.  Soulless—­that’s the word you wanted.”

“Something like that,” I answered, watching the gusts of wind on the sails.  “Not dead so much, as without soul.  That’s it.”

“Of course,” he went on, in a voice calculated, it seemed to me, not to reach our companion in the bows, “to live long in a place like this—­long and alone—­might bring about a strange result in some men.”

I suddenly realised he was talking with a purpose and pricked up my ears.

“There’s no life here.  These islands are mere dead rocks pushed up from below the sea—­not living land; and there’s nothing really alive on them.  Even the sea, this tideless, brackish sea, neither salt water nor fresh, is dead.  It’s all a pretty image of life without the real heart and soul of life.  To a man with too strong desires who came here and lived close to nature, strange things might happen.”