As Reginald pondered thus, he again let his elbows rest on the table and put his head in his hands. "The air is so hot!" he murmured, unloosing his flannel shirt-collar as he did so, "so hot! And--there--is--no--danger. Yet I promised her," again rousing himself, "yet--yet--Alderly stabbed the diver--if he had had a revolver--in the casket--Barbara----" He was asleep. Asleep peacefully, though wearily, worn out with his long day; and presently there was no noise in all the tranquil night but the sound of his regular breathing, and the ripple of the little river against the bows of the _Pompeia_, as it flowed down to the sea. Yet once he started from his slumbers, hearing in them, as he thought, a distant shriek, and hastily went on deck, wondering if aught could have befallen the girl up at the hut, but only to find that it was some night bird that had alarmed him. For in the woods, away up towards where the Alderlys dwelt, he could hear the macaws chattering--the birds which occasionally passed from one island to another--and an owl hooting. "It is nothing," he said wearily, "nothing. My nerves are overstrung--I have heard such sounds often at night since I have been here. It is nothing. They are fast asleep enough up there. And--and--I need watch no longer." So, utterly overcome now by the desire for slumber that had seized upon him, and not more than half awakened even by the visit to the deck, he stretched himself out at full length on the locker to get an hour or so of rest. Yet he was careful to place the revolver near to his hand. It wanted still an hour to the time when the moon would be above the fronds of the tallest palms on the eastern bank--a time at which even all the insect life of the island seemed at last to be hushed to rest--when, to the ripple of the river and its soft lap against the yacht's forefoot, was added another sound--the sound, subdued, it is true, yet still one that would have been perceptible to anyone who was awake in that yacht--of something disturbing, something passing through the waters; but, had the sleeper awakened to hear it, he could have seen nothing. All was still too dark, too profound. But he himself was seen--seen by a pair of gleaming eyes staring at him through the cabin window, the blinds of which had not been drawn, nor the latchwork closed; a pair of eyes that glistened from out a face over which the hair, all dank and matted with water, curled in masses. The face of Joseph Alderly!