And now this fountain, the last survivor of the twelve health-giving springs, had suddenly run dry. . . .

The bad news spread like wild-fire.  It was regarded—­for reasons which will presently appear—­as a portent of gravest significance.  The clergy met in unofficial but well-attended conclave to deliberate as to what attitude should be adopted towards the phenomenon, and what measures taken to allay popular apprehensions.

There was gossip, too, at the Club.  Most of its members were of the laissez Faire or even rationalistic type, and one of them—­an unobtrusive Hindu who was suspected of wearing stays—­went so far in his indifference as to declare that the only result of the drying-up of the fountain would be “one smell less on Nepenthe.”  A small but compact minority, however, thought otherwise.  Obsessed by vague forebodings, they found an able and eloquent interpreter of their fears in the Commissioner who, rather redder in the face than usual, strode fussily up and down the premises, tugging at his disreputable briar pipe, drinking the whisky with anybody who cared to pay for it, and declaring to all and sundry that something must be done.  It was his panacea—­his unvarying formula for every emergency, scandalous or otherwise.  Something must be done, he avowed.  And from the card-table came two approving echoes—­the voices of Mr. Muhlen and Signor Malipizzo, who did not care tuppence about the fountain but never lost an opportunity of expressing their public approval of Mr. Parker’s words and actions.

Something must be done and that soon, for in a few brief hours an atmosphere of gloom, a sense of impending calamity, had begun to hover over the sunny island.  The natives called to mind, with consternation, that only once within the memory of their ancestors had the fountain behaved after this fashion.  It was on the eve of that great volcanic outbreak on the mainland which, by a deadly shower of ashes, destroyed their crops and impoverished them to such an extent that for three consecutive months they could barely afford the most unnecessary luxuries of life.  They opined with some show of reason that the little streamlet had been tempted by ancient and obscure bonds to sympathy to forsake its old home and creep away, under leagues of shimmering sea, towards the fiery heart of the volcano; there to undergo some alchemic process of readjustment, some ordeal, some torrid nuptial rite which would result in the birth of a flaming monster and the ruin of mankind.

The terrace was crowded with folk; all eyes were turned toward the distant fire-mountain.  But the volcano had never looked so placid, so harmless, so attractive; its shapely flanks suffused with the crimson light of evening, while wreaths of violent vapour ascended, in lazy intermittent spirals, from the cone.  They rose into the zenith playfully, one after the other, as though the volcano were desirous of drawing attention to its pretty manners, and were wafted onwards,