It had been a bright clear day on the upland, so clear that the ramparts of Fort Jackson and the flagstaff were plainly visible twelve miles away from the long curving peninsula that stretched a bared white arm around the peaceful waters of Logport Bay.  It had been a clear day upon the sea-shore, albeit the air was filled with the flying spume and shifting sand of a straggling beach whose low dunes were dragged down by the long surges of the Pacific and thrown up again by the tumultuous trade-winds.  But the sun had gone down in a bank of fleecy fog that was beginning to roll in upon the beach.  Gradually the headland at the entrance of the harbor and the lighthouse disappeared, then the willow fringe that marked the line of Salmon River vanished, and the ocean was gone.  A few sails still gleamed on the waters of the bay; but the advancing fog wiped them out one by one, crept across the steel-blue expanse, swallowed up the white mills and single spire of Logport, and, joining with reinforcements from the marshes, moved solemnly upon the hills.  Ten minutes more and the landscape was utterly blotted out; simultaneously the wind died away, and a death-like silence stole over sea and shore.  The faint clang, high overhead, of unseen brent, the nearer call of invisible plover, the lap and wash of undistinguishable waters, and the monotonous roll of the vanished ocean, were the only sounds.  As night deepened, the far-off booming of the fog-bell on the headland at intervals stirred the thick air.

Hard by the shore of the bay, and half hidden by a drifting sand-hill, stood a low nondescript structure, to whose composition sea and shore had equally contributed.  It was built partly of logs and partly of driftwood and tarred canvas.  Joined to one end of the main building—­the ordinary log-cabin of the settler—­was the half-round pilot-house of some wrecked steamer, while the other gable terminated in half of a broken whale-boat.  Nailed against the boat were the dried skins of wild animals, and scattered about lay the flotsam and jetsam of many years’ gathering,—­bamboo crates, casks, hatches, blocks, oars, boxes, part of a whale’s vertebrae, and the blades of sword-fish.  Drawn up on the beach of a little cove before the house lay a canoe.  As the night thickened and the fog grew more dense, these details grew imperceptible, and only the windows of the pilot-house, lit up by a roaring fire within the hut, gleamed redly through the mist.

By this fire, beneath a ship’s lamp that swung from the roof, two figures were seated, a man and a woman.  The man, broad-shouldered and heavily bearded, stretched his listless powerful length beyond a broken bamboo chair, with his eyes fixed on the fire.  The woman crouched cross-legged upon the broad earthen hearth, with her eyes blinkingly fixed on her companion.  They were small, black, round, berry-like eyes, and as the firelight shone upon her smoky face, with its one striped cheek of gorgeous brilliancy, it was plainly the Princess Bob and no other.