if this doesn’t turn out right,” he went on, “we’ll have reached another part of the world, with a fresh chance of making money, instead of being poor in England, that breeding-ground for tame rabbits, where poverty is the unforgiveable sin.”  “I liked him for those words,” said Thalassa, “for they came from a man whose thoughts were after the style of my own.  ’Twas they decided the other chap, and next morning we set out for Capetown.  From there we got passages in a cargo boat for Sydney.”

Charles found it easier to visualize this picture than the former.  The departure of the three upon such a wild romantic venture had in its elements all the audacity, greed, and splendour of youth, and he also was young.

Thalassa went on with his story.

During the voyage to Sydney, Robert Turold used to talk to him on deck at nights after Remington had gone to his bunk.  It was in these solitary deck tramps under glittering stars that Thalassa first heard from the other’s lips of the Turrald title:  the title for which the fortune he was seeking was merely a stepping stone—­the means to obtain it.  “Night after night he talked of nothing else,” said Thalassa, “and I knew he would do what he wanted to do.”  It was easy to gather from his story that his original admiration for Robert Turold soon grew into a deeper and stronger feeling.  There was something in the dead man’s masterful ambitious character which exercised a reluctantly conceded but undoubted fascination upon his companion’s fierce spirit.

Such were their relations when they reached Sydney and set out on a further voyage to the other place which Thalassa was so reluctant to name.  On arriving at the “other place” they made their way to its east coast, which was the starting point of their journey to the island.  From a brown man living on the coast Thalassa hired a smart little ketch which the three of them could easily handle, and in this they embarked for the island from a beach which curved like a white tusk around a blue bay.

They did not reach the island for six days—­through baffling winds, and not because they did not steer a right course.  As Thalassa had said, there was no difficulty in finding it, for they had only been one day at sea when the smouldering smoke of the distant volcanic cone came into vision, making an unholy mark against the clear sky which they never lost again.  Gradually they beat nearer until they made it—­a circular ragged high ridge jutting abruptly from a deep sullen sea, with a red glow showing fitfully in the smoke of the summit.

There was an outer reef, but Thalassa knew the passage, and steered the ketch through a tortuous channel above sunken needle-pointed rocks to a little sheltered harbour inshore.  Here they made the ketch fast, and landed on a beach of volcanic violet, where they sometimes sank knee deep into sulphuric water, and felt squirming sea things squelch beneath their tread.  Above this margin of violet-black sand, deposits of volcanic rock and lava rose almost perpendicularly, enclosing the central cone in a kind of amphitheatre.