One picture more I can give. Polly had it from Arturo, when just for one brief moment on the Dolphin she reached him with her sisterly affection. There was a night, there on the island, when suddenly swept by longing, he held out his arms to Nereid. She came quite close to him, and gazed, with the tip of her hand holding him off. He saw, far in the tender moonlit sea of her eyes, the answer he sought. But her lips and her restraining hand denied him. He said, like a very manly, human boy: “Why, yes--you’re right, Nereid.” And her tender eyes, dimmed suddenly by mist, were thanking him as he turned away. CHAPTER VII. THIS ENEMY INFERNAL! In the pink and gold tropic dawn of the morning of August 15, we took them aboard the Dolphin. Arturo did not mention, then, the globe of metal lying there in the rocks at the ocean’s edge. We did not chance to notice it. We left Arturo’s plane--he said, with a quiet force which had come to him, that even if we could have taken it, we had no use for it. They came out from the rocky slope, swimming to us as we lay near by. I saw the girl, like a nymph, swimming. She was nearly always under water. Each time as she came up, and waited for Arturo to overtake her, he seemed directing her. We drew them aboard. I saw her then as a girl much smaller, more slim of figure than Arturo, standing drooping, with her face hidden in the tangle of her hair and her crooked arm. She was blinded by the light of the dawn. Frightened, perhaps, by our voices, by our clutching hands as we drew her up the Dolphin’s side. Arturo carried her to one of the Dolphin’s tiny rooms. There in the dark, barring us, he left her. A quiet force had come to Arturo. He met his father’s questions and turned them aside. It was this time not sullenness, not brooding, nor anything neurotic. A quiet force, rather, a purpose. There were things that he would tell us, and things that he would not. No fire from his father could shake him. No irony touched him. No pleading from Polly could soften him. Yet, with it all, he was tender, affectionate; and underneath, I think, sometimes a little wistful. This was a new Arturo. It struck Dr. Plantet sharply. There was one brief passage in which Dr. Plantet was so obviously the loser, for he said much, and Arturo said almost nothing. And when it was ended, Arturo kissed his father. “I want you to believe in me. You will have to trust me, father, there isn’t any other way; you’ll have to go it blind. I’m sorry--and I love you, all of you, very much--” It was in these latter words that I caught the wistful note, a gentle sorrow, mingled with his purpose.