"Oh, yes, he's on the steamer." Fenton was groping, without a woman's intuitions, through the something he felt in the air. "Don't you like him, Elaine?" he asked her, bluntly. "What's wrong?" "Why--nothing's wrong," she answered, unconvincingly. "It's just the surprise of meeting you like this." "I'm sorry," he said, as he had before, his eyes now entirely smileless. "I might have managed it better, I suppose---- Aren't you a little bit glad to see me?" Elaine attempted a smile and a manner more cordial. "Of course--I'm delighted! But it takes me just a minute or so to realize it's really you." "Never mind. Take your time," he told her, indulgently. "Perfect miracle, you know, that you and old Sid should have come through the wreck of the 'Inca'--the sole survivors of the accident--and lived out there--somewhere--on an island, I hear--and now be nearing home. I'm eager to hear the story." "Yes," she agreed, "it doesn't seem real to me, now. It's more like a long, strange dream." "I have only heard a little from the captain," he continued, forcing a conversation which he felt was wholly unspontaneous and hardly even congenial. "Naturally, all his information----" She saw his eyes quickly brighten as his gaze went past her to the stairs. "Sid!" he cried, moving swiftly forward; and Grenville appeared on the deck. His face was suddenly reddened, beneath the veneer of tan. But the boyish joy with which he rushed for Fenton was a heartening thing to see. The two simply gripped, with might and main, and hammered each other with one free hand apiece, and laughed, and called one another astonishing names till it seemed they might explode. "You savage! You tough old Redskin!" Fenton finally managed to articulate, distinctly. "If it isn't yourself as big as life! And I want you to know I haven't made your fortune--not exactly--yet--but it's certain at last. And how about your winning my little girl? Speak up, you caveman of the---- Oh, Elaine!" But Elaine had fled the scene. That moment began the tug at the ties of friendship and the test of the souls of the three. It was not a time of happiness that thereupon ensued. Elaine avoided both the men as far as possible. Grenville alone seemed natural, and yet even his smiles were tinged with the artificial. He was glad to relate their varied adventures--the tale of the perils through which they had finally won. But how much of it all Gerald Fenton really heard no man could with certainty tell. Fenton was neither a self-conceited person nor a blind man, groping through life. Through the stem of his finely colored calabash he puffed many a thought, along with his fragrant tobacco fume, and revolved it in his brain. Between certain lines of Grenville's story he read deep happenings. That Sidney had saved and preserved Elaine, and battled for her comfort and her very life, against all but overwhelming odds, was a fact that required no rehearsal.