If she had still been upon the island, those marines, landing there with such a vainglorious, belligerent gesture, undoubtedly would have frightened her. She would have hidden, plunging into the lagoon perhaps, to await their departure. She might still be there. And Arturo, alone--he told himself that he would not frighten her. He found himself trembling. Ah, it would not be she who would be frightened; yet with every fiber of him he longed to encounter her. The setting sun before him found Arturo and his little Wasp in the neighborhood of nine degrees thirty minutes N., one hundred and fifty-seven degrees twenty-five minutes E. He had met a fresh, strong head-wind for most of the day. And his engine, over this long, continuous flight, had been giving him some trouble. He had cut down his speed. But he was here, at sunset; it was that same evening of August 10 during which our little Dolphin was being carried westward by the Australian mail. In the late afternoon Arturo had passed over the Northern Marshalls--the tip of the Ratack Chain. He had seen several of the through Flyers during the day, passing to the sides far above him; but none had spoken him. “Nereid’s Island.” He was already calling it that in his mind. He would call her Nereid. He had not wanted to reach here before the sunset anyway. In the golden path of the setting sun he raised the island. At low speed his motor was quite silent. He might have been a softly humming wasp, circling over the lonely little island, coming gently down, circling. It lay, a strangely augmented patch of land in the fallen ocean. All around it was a low, outside circular area of green-black and coral rocks, sloping steeply upward, strewn with shriveled, drying marine vegetation--at the bottom of which the sea was lapping. A sodden, upward rocky slope led to where, high up in the air, a fringe of white beach lay queerly dry. Above that, a crescent area of palms and vegetation. The inner lagoon was dry--an empty, sandy bowl, perched up there in the air on a spreading rocky base. It seemed no earthly island; a small mountain top with a shallow crater in its center and a strange fringe of trees and meaningless beach. There was no sign of moving object. With his heart pounding, Arturo gazed down. There were many caverns and pools in the lower slopes from which the ocean had fallen--she could hide there very easily. And then he saw, or thought he saw, something unusual--the bulge of a metallic surface. It lay nearly submerged in a rift of rock far down the outer slope at the water’s edge. The globe we had seen in the ocean that night? He fancied so. Lying in that position it would have been well covered by water when the marines were here. In the glowing, glorious twilight of that tropic night, Arturo landed in the basin of the empty lagoon, then rolled his Wasp up the gentle slope of the inner beach. * * * * *