As he took it scientifically and good-humoredly, I let it go; besides, as I remembered later, my anger had left me. "Captain," he said seriously, "I have a proposition for you--that you take me and my phenomenon, with my attendants and apparatus, down to your island, where, I presume, we will be undisturbed. When I am alone with him I wish to try some experiments that I have long contemplated, but which have been interfered with by the people of this city. I will assume all expenses." "Come along," I answered graciously. "I won't come within a mile of you, and the coolies will avoid you both." "And, Ella," he said, turning to the girl he thought he loved, "it will necessitate a postponement of our wedding for a while. I cannot take you down into the South Pacific on an uncertainty. You will not mind, I know; we have waited long, and can wait a little longer. You agree with me, do you not, captain?" "Of course, I do," I answered with a leaping heart, but trying to appear unconcerned. "It's no place for a woman." She merely bowed her head and said nothing. What she thought I could not know. Nor can I remember much of what I thought myself. Mingled with my joy over the delay, there seemed to be vague imaginings of my holding Dartmoor by the heels over the taffrail and dropping him into the water. But I am not sure that these visions did not come later. Wrong, of course; but I was an angry and jealous man. I saw her once more before we sailed, but could not move her. She was kind, gentle with me, and sorrowful, but obedient to the influence of Dartmoor, with no will but his. So I gave it up for the time, trusting not to a watery grave to break his influence but to his absence from her. We transferred the freak by night and lodged it in the hold, where I had built a sort of enclosure under the cabin trunk for the apparatus. Dartmoor brought a couple of his servants along to carry on the daily exercising, and my Kanaka crew expressed no curiosity concerning the strange weights they hoisted over the side at midnight. So, we got away without trouble. Whether or not Dartmoor exercised any mental influence over me I do not know. I felt a healthy hatred for him as the man who had taken the woman I loved, but I could not bring myself to quarrel with him. He could not force me to like him, but possibly he disarmed my resentment by his kindly feeling for me. My island was a small affair, as islands go--merely the top of a submerged mountain--surrounded by a barrier reef with only one passage through it; and this entrance was known to no one but myself. Well up from the beach I had erected huts for my coolie divers and a comfortable house for myself on the high ground near a spring of water.