"And she read it?"
"Si, Señor!"
"And there was.... no reply?"
"No, Señor!"
Well, that settled it. I had my congé. Cock Island and those wonder days with Marjorie must go into the store-house of past memories.... Yet there was a tug at my heart as for a moment I thought of her as I had held her in my arms in the burial-chamber and she had raised her face to mine. "Money doesn't count down here!" she had whispered; but now we were back in the work-a-day world where money could prove an insuperable barrier between true lovers....
In moody silence I dressed and went above. A crescent moon hung low down on the horizon and the deck was eerie with fantastic shadows. No one was about. On our starboard bow the rugged mass of Cock Island was a black blur against the stars.
It is one of the failings of the Celtic temperament that its moments of the highest elation are apt to be followed by phases of the deepest depression. Reaction had come upon me after our days of high adventure and floored me utterly. All the spice, so it seemed to me in that dark hour beneath the moon on the Cristobal's deserted deck, had gone out of the romance of my profession and left me with an ill taste in my mouth. As I paced up and down I revisualised the scenes through which I had passed in my quest; Adams gasping for breath in his hovel, Garth and I scrambling through the steaming jungle, that storm-tossed figure by the grave, Marjorie pillowing her gold-brown head on my chest in the darkness of the cave.
From every one of the pictures which passed across my mind her face seemed to look out, the narrow pencilled eyebrows above the clear grey eyes, the great tenderness of her mouth.... Within a few hours, I pondered sadly, I had found my love and lost her just as I had found and lost the treasure....
A voice was hailing us out of the gloom that hung over the opalescent sea.
"Cristobal ahoy!"