"Can't you relieve my curiosity a little, at once? What became of your boat ... and Applebo..." "Oh, well..." Hermione gave a brief and rather impatient outline of her adventure. Cécile listened attentively. "How dreadful!" she exclaimed. "I hope that this will teach you not to run about alone in that wild way. Now go and take off your wet things and get a pot of good hot coffee. You look very badly." It occurred to Hermione that, since she looked so badly, her sister might have sacrificed her own curiosity and let her change before telling her tale. But she was feeling rather gone, and with very little fight left in her body, so she turned and hurried off without a word. Her maid gave her a vigorous rub-down, then put her to bed, and brought coffee, with eggs and bacon, which Hermione devoured with great enthusiasm, despite the varying emotions through which she had so recently passed. Her breakfast finished, Hermione fell into a deep and refreshing sleep, from which she was awakened a couple of hours later by a stamping and roaring overhead, which she recognised as proceeding from her father, and from which she gathered that he was being put in possession of the facts concerning her adventure. This was indeed the case, but in the meantime there had arrived from the diplomatic superintendent of the gun club a note of apology and regret for the too great zeal of his minion. Wherefore, balked in his opportunity to raise a tremendous row, Captain Bell was working off steam in storming about and vituperating the club, Shoal Harbour, the State of Maine, the Pilot-fish, Hermione, and generally, as sailors put it, "cursing everything a foot high and a minute old." This innocent pastime exhausted, it occurred to him that, after all, he owed a duty to the Pilot-fish, but for whom Hermione would have been subjected to great indignity. From the account given him by Cécile, Mr. Applebo had apparently done a hammer-throw with the game-keeper, then swum off to the schooner with Hermione trailing from his shoulders. Captain Bell was a stickler for etiquette, and therefore he decided to call immediately upon the poet and express his obligation. "You say that you have seen him somewhere?" he asked of Heldstrom. Christian Heldstrom shook his big, shaggy head. There was a distant brooding look in his blue eyes, usually so keen and alert. "I am not sure. Dere vas somedings ... like an echo in his voice. Like somebody I haf known ... long ago, in Norvay ... or some odder place. His name, Applebo, vas Scandinavian, too. I do not know."