“Tobias!  Impossible!”

“Come here,” and she led me a yard or two back the way she had come, and then cautiously looked through the trees.

“Gone!” she said, “but he was there a minute or two ago—­or at least some one that is his photograph—­and, of course, he’s there yet, hidden in the brush, and probably got his eyes on us all the time.  Did you see that seven-year apple tree move?”

“His favourite tree,” I laughed.

“Hardly strong enough to hang him on though.”  And I realised that she was King Alcinoues’s daughter.

We crouched lower for a moment or two, but the seven-year apple tree didn’t move again, and we agreed that there was no use in waiting for Tobias to show his hand.

“He is too good a poker-player,” I said.

“Like his skeletons, eh?” she said.

“But what made you think it was Tobias?” I asked, “and how did it all happen?”

“I could hardly fail to recognise him from your flattering description,” she answered, “and indeed it all happened rather like another experience of mine.  I had gone into Sweeney’s store—­you remember?—­and was just paying my bill.”

“In the usual coinage?” I ventured.  She gave me a long, whimsical smile—­once more her father’s daughter.

“That, I’m afraid, was the trouble,” she answered; “for, as I laid my money down on the counter, I suddenly noticed that there was a person at the back of the store ...”

“A person?” I interrupted.

“Yes! suppose we say ‘a pock-marked person’; was it you?”

“What a memory you have for details,” I parried, “and then?”

“Well!  I took my change and managed to whisper a word to Sweeney—­a good friend, remember—­and came out.  I took a short cut back, but the ‘person’ that had stood in the back of the store seemed to know the way almost better than I—­so well that he had got ahead of me.  He was walking quietly this way, and so slowly that I had at last to overtake him.  He said nothing, just watched me, as if interested in the way I was going—­but, I’m ashamed to say, he rather frightened me!  And here I am.”

“Do you really think he saw the—­doubloon—­like that other ’person’?” I asked.

“There’s no doubt of it.”

“Well, then,” I said, “let’s hurry home, and talk it over with the ‘King.’”

The “King,” as I had realised, was a practical “romantic” and at once took the matter seriously, leaving—­as might have surprised some of those who had only heard him talk—­his conversational fantasies on the theme to come later.

Calypso, however, had the first word.

“I always told you, Dad,” she said;—­and the word “Dad” on the lips of that big statuesque girl—­who always seemed ready to take that inspired framework of rags and bones and talking music into her protecting arms—­seemed the quaintest of paradoxes—­, “I always told you, Dad, what would happen, with your fairy-tales of the doubloons.”