"Why not?" they asked, in surprise.
"I bought the thing this afternoon. It didn't seem to me quite modest to exploit our little adventure in public."
This was a new phase of the strange boy's character and the girls did not know whether to approve it or not.
"It must have cost you something!" remarked Flo, the irrepressible.
"Besides, how could you do it while you were asleep?"
"Why, I wakened long enough to use the telephone," he replied with a smile. "There are more wonderful inventions in the world than motion pictures, you know."
"But you like motion pictures, don't you?" asked Maud, wondering why he had suppressed the film in question.
"Very much. In fact, I am more interested in them than in anything else, not excepting the telephone—which makes Aladdin's lamp look like a firefly in the sunshine."
"I suppose," said Flo, staring into his face with curious interest, "that you will introduce motion pictures into your island of Sangoa, when you return?"
"I suppose so," he answered, a little absently. "I had not considered that seriously, as yet, but my people would appreciate such a treat, I'm sure."
This speech seemed to destroy, in a manner, their shrewd conjecture that he was in America to purchase large quantities of films. Why, then, should Goldstein have paid such abject deference to this unknown islander?