"I should like to see that island," she said. "I wonder if we shall go anywhere near it?"
If I smiled it was only at the hold the ancient tale had apparently taken upon her.
"Bonteck will doubtless make it a port of call, if you ask him to. But it is hundreds of miles from here."
"What does it look like?"
"Very much like any or all of the coral islands you may have seen pictured in your school geographies, only it is long and narrow instead of being circular, like the Pacific atolls. But it is a true coral island, for all that; a strip of land possibly a quarter of a mile wide and a mile long, densely wooded—jungled, you might say—with tropical vegetation; a beach of white sand running all the way around; beyond the beach, a lagoon; and enclosing the lagoon, and with only a few passages through it here and there, the usual coral reef. The lagoon is shallow for the greater part of it, but outside of the reef the bottom goes down like the side of a mountain."
"Why, you must have seen the island!" she said.
"I have," I answered, rather grimly.
"Did you land on it when you were there?—but of course you must have, to be able to describe it so well."
"Oh, yes; I landed upon it," I admitted.
Again she let her gaze go adrift to leeward. She was evidently reveling in something that seemed to her more tangible than Kingsley's famous story of Amyas Leigh and his voyagings.