“Talman’s Island!” Her voice changed. It was shot through with fear and pain. “That is the island where they were holding us prisoners, you and I. There’s another little island close by where they stayed themselves in a tumble-down cabin.
“Tell me,” again the girl changed the subject, “how did they come to get you?”
“Took me in my sleep. Rolled me up in my blankets on the Pullman and shoved me through the window. I went to sleep waiting for the train to move up and pick up the rest of the squad. Carried me down the river in the speed boat, then over to some place where they put me on the plane. Then, thunder through the night, the roar of motors, and there I was in that cabin, there on the island.
“And you?”
“It was all absurdly simple,” she sighed. “One can’t be rich and happy, it seems, these days. Perhaps no one should wish to be. I don’t know.” There was a world of questioning in her tone.
“Our home is large. The grounds that surround it are broad. I loved to walk there in the moonlight alone. Had I been the cook or the maid, I might have walked in peace. But the daughter—
“Well, two men seized me one night and carried me away in a car. I kicked out and bit and tried to scream. It did no good.”
She paused as if exhausted by the very thought of it.
“They brought me up here,” she began again, after a time. “Just as they did you. I had been in that little pen of logs a whole day before they brought you. It—it was rather terrible. But by and by it came to me that I was on Isle Royale.
“Do you know,” a faint smile played about her lips, “if I must leave this gloriously beautiful world, which of course some time I must, I’d sort of like to be on Isle Royale when that day comes. It wouldn’t be so hard, the parting. And somehow I feel that, after all, it’s just passing from beauty to more beauty.”