"I may have to pay Juby a good deal, for her," he mused, as he went up the path to Barbara's house. "However, we ought to find the wherewithal on the Key to do so. I suppose she will give me enough to do that." And he laughed to himself as the thought passed through his mind. Barbara was eating her evening meal when he reached the hut, and he sat down to share it with her, telling her that henceforth she would have to keep him in food as long as they were together. "I had loaded the _Pompeia_ up with all sorts of good things such as are to be procured in the islands and at their stores," he said, trying to be gay and also to brighten her up, "but I might have saved myself the trouble. They are at the bottom of the river, and there they will stay until they are rotten. So, Barbara, I must live on you." She gave him one swift glance from the sweet hazel eyes under the straight black eyebrows--eyes whose lids were red now from long weeping--and he understood it well enough. He knew that she would give him everything she possessed in the world, including her very life, as well as the fortune that was now to be hers--if old Nicholas had made no mistake, and if no one had ever lighted on the Key and its contents between the time of his departure and the coming of the other Barbara. "By-the-bye," he said, as they ate their supper side by side, and Barbara tried to put such choice morsels of her poor plain food as there were on his plate, which attention he managed sometimes to avoid--"by-the-bye, we don't know after all what we are really going to discover. Nicholas managed to lose one of the most important parts of his manuscript, the list, as he calls it, of part of what he found. It is a good thing he didn't mislay the description of the Key and the measurements as well. If he had done that we should have been in a fix." "But," said Barbara, "he has said what is in the long box. We know that, at any rate. Surely that's a fortune in itself?" "What! six thousand pounds! Why, Barbara, when you go out into the world, the real world, London, the Continent, swagger German and Swiss places in the summer, and Rome and the Riviera in the winter, you'll find what a little bit of money six thousand pounds make. No! Nick's fifty thousand 'guineas' must be found for you before you become anything like a swell heiress with a romantic history, run after by all the men for your beauty and your wealth." "Don't--don't talk like that!" the girl said. "It pains me to hear you joking like that. I know nothing of the places you mention, and as to men running after me--oh, don't, don't! And besides, you have forgotten--it is not mine." "Every penny of it!" exclaimed Reginald, "except what Mr. Juby wants for the yacht if uninsured."