CHAPTER XXXII.
THE SOLITUDE IS INTERRUPTED.
The weather had changed, and, as is always the case in the tropics, the change was extreme.
The wind blew now from the northeast, dashing the sea up in mountains on to the strip of beach around that quarter of Coffin Island, hurling it with a roar like great claps of thunder over the beach on to the vegetation beyond it, crashing down trees and saplings, and entirely obliterating for a time the three little Keys, in the middle one of which was Simon Alderly's treasure. This Key Reginald had gazed upon more than once since he had been in the island; he had even pointed it out to Barbara on the morning after she had told her tale, and had added the few missing links to the knowledge she already possessed; and he had also informed her that therein lay her fortune.
"So," the girl said on that morning, as she gazed down from the cliff on which they stood to where the already fast-rising waves were washing over the spot in question, "it is there they ought to have searched. It has laid there all the time! Yet no one ever thought of those little islets. Well! I am glad!"
"Why?" asked Reginald, as he looked round at her. He had given her his arm to steady her against the fierce wind blowing now under the purple, sun-coloured clouds rolling up from the northeast, and she had taken it. Yet, as she did so, she scarcely knew why she should accept that proffered arm. She was used to all changes of weather in this, her island; she could stand as easily upon the tallest crags that it possessed as any of her goats, or even the sea-birds that dwelt upon them, could do. Yet, still, she had taken it!
"Oh! I don't know," she replied in answer to his question; "yet--yet, I think I am. Because--" she paused again, and then went on. "Because, you see, if any of my people had found it before now--before you came here--why, you would have found nothing yourself when you arrived, after you had made so long a journey. And, we should have been gone--you and I would never have met."
Something in the sailor's nature tingled as she said those words in her simplicity--something, he knew not what. Still, in response, he turned his eyes on her, and gazed into those other clear eyes beside him, shaded with their long, jet-black lashes. Then he said--
"For us never to have met would have been the worst thing of all, Barbara."
It seemed absurd to call her Miss Alderly, here in this wild tropical garden inhabited only by themselves; to give her the stilted prefix that would have been required in the midst of civilisation. So, not for the first time, he had addressed her by her Christian name. And to her--who perhaps in her schooldays only, in Antigua, had ever known what it was to be spoken of as Miss Alderly--it appeared not at all strange that he should so address her.