There was no answer.
“Joe Brazybone, will you speak to me? I know you are there somewheres, if I can’t see you. Now you come in, or you won’t get no dinner this day. Skulkin’ round those rocks, as if you was a seal! I wish ’t you was!”
She went into the house and shut the door with a bang.
“Is this wise?” asked the preacher, looking down at Joe, who was shaking with silent laughter. “Why do you want to make her angry, Joseph? and you will be hungry presently, if you are not now.”
“Joe cooks his own dinner, whenever he gets a chance, preacher. He’s a good cook, Joe is, and Mother Brazybone ain’t, you see. She’ll go off a-visitin’ pretty soon, and then Joe’ll get him some dinner. What was you lookin’ for, preacher, when you come out here on my rocks? You was lookin’ for some one, and it wasn’t Joe.”
“You are right,” said the preacher, “I saw a young girl in the hall,—or rather, she stood outside, leaning in at the window,—whose face interested me greatly. She disappeared before the service was over, and I wondered if I might see her somewhere. I—I hardly know why I came down here to look for her. She was a beautiful girl, about fourteen, I should think, with long hair of a strange colour, and very brilliant eyes.”
She paused, for Joe Brazybone was nodding and blinking with every appearance of delight.
“You saw her, did you?” he said. “Yes! yes! anybody would notice Isly. She’d be queen of this hull island, if folks had their rights, and if other folks knowed a queen when they saw her. Not governor, I don’t mean, nor yet anything of that sort, but a real queen, with a crown on her head, and all the folks down on their marrer-bones every time she set her foot out-o’-doors.”
“I don’t understand you,” said the preacher. “Do you mean that the island belongs by right to that young girl?”
Joe nodded like a mandarin.