"O! once in a great while," he answered, evasively. "I suppose they have a few old coins in the family, and use them when they run out of others."
It was as lame an explanation as well could be, and no one could doubt that, whatever his reason for so doing, he was lying.
"But haven't you trouble in disposing of them?" I enquired.
"Gold is always gold," he answered, "and we don't see enough of it here to be particular as to whose head is stamped upon it, or what date. Besides, as I said, it isn't as if I got many of them; and you can always dispose of them as curiosities."
"Will you sell me this one?" I asked.
"I see no harm in your having it," he said, "but I'd just as soon you didn't mention where you got it."
"Certainly," I answered, disguising my wonder at his secretiveness. "What is it worth?"
He named the sum of sixteen dollars and seventy-five cents. Having paid him that amount, I bade him good-night, glad to be alone with my eager, glowing thoughts. These I took with me to a bit of coral beach made doubly white by the moon, rustled over by giant palms, and whispered to by the vast living jewel of the sea. Surely my thoughts had a brightness to match even this glitter of the night. I took out my strange doubloon, and flashed it in the moon.
But, brightly as it shone, it hardly seemed as bright as it would have seemed a short while back; or, perhaps, it were truer to say that in another, newer aspect it shone a hundred times more brightly. The adventure to which it called me was no longer single and simple as before, but a gloriously confused goal of cloudy splendours, the burning core of which—suddenly raying out, and then lost again in brightness—were the eyes of a mysterious girl.