Michael shot her an approving glance. “That’s just the point that has me guessing,” he said. “It rather looks to me as if the fellow’s excavations didn’t prove successful after all.”
“But he had the measurements right—we’ve proved that, haven’t we?”
Michael nodded. He seemed to be thinking deeply.
Suddenly Eve got up and wandered over to the blackened stone figure. She stood with her back to us for several minutes, examining it. At last she turned around. “Suppose,” she said slowly, looking down to where Michael and I were sitting, our backs propped against the bowl of the fountain, “suppose this isn’t the statue of Circe after all!”
“What!” Michael was on his feet like a flash. “I say,” he cried, “that’s an idea! Maybe the old fellow got the wrong statue!”
“You see,” went on Eve, “Captain Trout told us there were several statues which Captain Judd brought home from his travels. He said there was one of Diana and one of Mercury. And this statue, even though it is so dingy and weatherbeaten, looks to me a lot more like Mercury than anyone else. Look, you can see the places where the wings were broken off on his back.”
“Gee, Eve, you’re dead right!” Michael cried appreciatively. “Pretty dumb of me not to notice that myself!” It was the first time that Michael had addressed either of us directly by our first names. I felt that it was a tribute to Eve’s intelligence.
“We simply took it for granted that it was the right statue,” Eve continued. “And, of course, our friend Bangs couldn’t be expected to know a great deal about mythology. I suppose one statue looks pretty much like another to a fellow like him.”
“Then the thing to do,” I burst in excitedly, “is to find the right one—the missing Circe! She surely must be somewhere around.”
The garden, as I have said, was so overgrown with weeds, tall grass, rambling rosebushes and every other variety of shrub that the space around the fountain where Mr. Bangs had made his measurements was practically the only clear spot in sight. But we now set to work to make a thorough search of the entire place. But though we combed it from one end to the other, startling toads from their lairs and stirring up swarms of mosquitoes, we found not the slightest trace of any other statue.