It was Mermaid’s last day on the beach. In a week she would be in New York, taking special courses at Columbia and perhaps elsewhere. She was going in for cooking and chemistry, the chemistry of foods, and later she might take some medical courses leading to a study of the chemistry of digestion. “The chemistry of the human body,” she said to Guy, “is a job for the next fifty years.” Guy considered, lazily. “If you like it, I suppose,” he said, reflectively. “I wish I knew enough chemistry to analyze my father, for instance. Not his digestion, which is perfect, but his mind. But I think the best approach to the mind is still alchemy. The philosopher’s stone probably exists, only we’ve always been on the wrong track in hunting it. It would be an idea that would transmute base-mindedness to rare-mindedness, and not base metals to gold. My father needs that kind of a philosopher’s stone; perhaps I do, too. We’re very unlike, you know; often it seems to me as if he weren’t my father at all. Sometimes I think he hates me, but even if he did--there are ties hate can’t break.” His voice lowered and his queer eyes looked into the distance. “Some day,” he said, “some day, Mermaid, I’ll tell you, maybe----You pulled me out once, you know.” He looked at her with a painful appeal. His eyes were those of a wild fawn. An almost overpowering desire to answer that appeal swept through the girl, met the solid wall of her final doubt of him, and was broken to pieces. She gave his hand a friendly squeeze. “Good-bye,” she said, and left him. PART THREE I In the room, besides the people, there was a coffin and a black flag decorated with the skull and crossbones of buccaneers--or fictioneers. Every once in a while persons went down a ladder to a dim, smoky room where heads bumped the ceiling and where casks and kegs and straw-covered wine bottles stood and hung about in an ornamental sort of way. Mediterranean-looking servitors went to and fro in the subterranean crypt or chamber with great mugs of ginger ale. Visitors usually bent over the large, dark table in the centre whereon lay a carefully executed map--the map of “Treasure Island.” The men wore their hair long, the women wore theirs bobbed. Candles, the only light, threw grotesque shadows. Occasionally a waiter sang, “Pour, oh, pour the pirate sherry” from “The Pirates of Penzance” or “Yo-ho-ho! and a bottle of rum.” Somewhere in obscure darkness a parrot squawked. The sounds were favourably construed into cries of “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”