"No. I must plead guilty to not being aware that it possessed one. May I hear it?"
"It has a strange fascination for me—that place. I never pass it without thinking of the romance connected with it. Do you see that tall palm to the right there?"
"Yes."
"Well, under that palm is a grave; the resting-place of a man whom I can remember seeing very often when I was only a little child."
"What sort of a man?"
"Ah, that's a question a good many would have liked to have answered. Though it's years ago, I can see him now as plainly as if it were but yesterday. He was very tall and very handsome. Possibly forty years old, though at first sight he looked more than that, for the reason that his hair and moustache were as white as snow. He lived in a hut on that bluff far away from everybody. In all the years he was there he was never known to cross the straits to the settlement, but once every three months he used to come down to our store for rations and two English letters. I believe we were the only souls he ever spoke to, and then he never said any more than was absolutely necessary. The pearlers used to call him the Hermit of the Bluff."
"Do you think he was quite sane?"
"I'm sure of it. I think now he must have been the victim of some great sorrow, or, perhaps, some man of family exiled from his country for no fault of his own."
"What makes you imagine that?"
"Why, because it was my father who found him lying lifeless on the floor of his hut. He had been dead some days and nobody any the wiser. Hoping to find something to tell him who he was, my father searched the hut, but without success. But when, however, he lifted the poor body, he caught a glimpse of something fastened round his neck. It was a large gold locket, with a crown or coronet upon the cover. Inside it was a photograph of some great lady—but though he recognised her, my father would never tell me her name—and a little slip of paper, on which was written these words: 'Semper fidelis: Thank God, I can forgive. It is our fate. Good-bye.' They buried him under the palm yonder and the locket with him."