"Will you tell me," he said, "to whom I owe this hospitable reception on Coffin Island? Will you tell me your name?"
"My name," she replied, "is Barbara Alderly."
CHAPTER XXXI.
SOME LIGHT UPON THE PAST.
Her name was Barbara Alderly! This girl whose beauty was as fresh and pure as her mind was innocent, the girl who--in spite of being able to shoot birds for her food and cook them too, or to sail a boat as well as Reginald himself could do--looked as delicate as any girl brought up in an English country house, was Barbara Alderly, his, the pirate's, descendant! It seemed impossible--impossible that she could claim relationship with such as he had been; yet it was so!
A week passed from the time she had divulged her name, a week in which they were always together during the daytime--he going to his boat at night, and joining her again in the early morning--and in that week each had told the other their story, Barbara being the first to relate hers. But in justice to Reginald it must be said that, never from the moment he had heard who she was, had he had one thought of keeping back from her the secret of where the treasure was hidden, or of depriving her and her relations of one farthing of it.
"It must all be theirs," he said to himself, "all, all. I could not go away from this island with one penny of it in my pocket and continue to think myself an honest man."
But first he had to hear her family story--in itself a romance, if ever there was one--she telling it to him a few days after their acquaintance, as they sat on the verandah, while he drank some water from one of the calabashes, flavoured with a dash of whisky brought up by him from the Pompeia, and she played with her inseparable companion, the dog, Carazo.
"You must know," she began, "that it was not until some years after Simon Alderly--who was the man I think to have been a pirate--failed to return to Port Royal, where he lived, that his still young wife, Barbara--her name being the same as mine--found the paper telling her of the treasure in this island."
"Barbara!" Reginald interrupted, memory recalling Nicholas's words once more. "Barbara! A portrait of a girl with blue eyes, red gold hair, and a sweet mouth!"