It was no very difficult task—the capturing of Madeleine. She fell in promptly and amiably with my suggestion that we go on an exploring tramp around the beach line of the island, and I took her the roundabout way, as Bonteck had directed, to make her release last as long as possible.
I don't recall what we talked about at first, only I know that it was all perfectly innocuous. We had common ground enough—the people we both knew at home, a summer fortnight on the North Shore when she was a débutante and we were fellow guests in the same house group, a winter tour in California when we had both chanced to be members of the same party. But inevitably, and in spite of all I could do to turn it aside, the talk eventually drifted around to the present with its more than dubious possibilities.
"Conetta tells me that you were once ship-wrecked on this same bit of coral, Dick," was the way she switched from the North Shore house party to Pirates' Hope. "Doesn't it seem a most remarkable coincidence that you should have the misfortune to have to repeat that experience?"
"Compared with the other experience, this is a vacation pleasure camp," I said, trying to keep the serious aspect of things in the background. "We came ashore in a hurricane, the six of us who were not drowned, and had to live on cocoanuts and raw fish. We hadn't even the makings of a fire."
"How dreadful it must have been!" she exclaimed. "I should think that the memory of that terrible time would color every minute of the day for you now, with all the reminders there must be."
"Not a bit of it," I denied cheerfully. "'The mill doesn't grind with the water that has passed,' you know. And, besides, the Mary Jane's survivors were taken off in due time—which we may take as an earnest that we shall be picked up, sooner or later."
We had reached the extreme eastern point of the islet by this time, and she stopped and faced me.
"Are you really believing that, Dick?" she asked, with a little trembling of the pretty lips that she could not wholly control, though a blind man might have seen that she was trying to, hard enough.
"Of course I am."
"I'm afraid you wouldn't admit it to me if you weren't. You see, I can't forget that those others stayed here and starved—long ago, you know—the crew of the Santa Lucia."