It was of Gilbert Bampfyld alone that he thought, of him alone about whom he speculated, since, of all the others who had been in the _Emperor of the Moon_, he was the only one whose body could by any possibility have come ashore. They, those others, Pooley and his wife, were in the submerged cabin, no power on earth could have got them out of it; any men left in the galley and the forecastle were in as equally bad a plight. Nothing could have saved them, or have even released their bodies. But, as he thought of Gilbert Bampfyld, so he felt sure that he also must have perished, even though he was not thus below as those others had been. Still musing on all this, but with one other image ever present to his mind--the image of the woman he loved--dishevelled and storm-beaten, but always beautiful--the woman of whom, now, he began to dream once more, to dream of winning for his own in some distant day--he went on along the beach, his eyes glancing everywhere around and near him. Glancing into the wild, tangled vegetation, along the channels of the rivulet's courses, but sometimes with them fixed on the beach. Suddenly he stopped, his heart quivering again, beating fast. At his feet there lay a sailor's rough jacket, and, a little farther off, a cap--a common, blue-flannel thing, such as the mercantile sailor buys for a few pence at a Ratcliffe Highway slop-shop. He stopped, regarding them--not with that agitation which the greatest romancer who ever lived has depicted as clutching at Crusoe's heart when he saw the footmarks, but, instead, with a feeling of astonishment; yet a feeling of astonishment which, he told himself, he, a sailor, ought not to experience. 'Do not all wrecks,' he muttered, 'send forth around them countless articles of débris, countless portions of the raffle that encumbers their decks? What more likely than that a sailor's jacket and a cap should have floated ashore?' Then he stooped, and, feeling them, found that they were thoroughly dry, so that they must have been ashore for some hours at least, since even the fierce sun of the now declining day could not have dried them in less time, all soaked with water as they had been. CHAPTER XXIV BEATEN! DEFEATED! 'No,' he said to Bella some time later, and when he had returned to her, 'no other signs than these. Nothing,' while, as he spoke, he pointed to the jacket and cap at his feet. He had brought them with him after the discovery, thinking that perhaps they might be useful when the time came for them to set out in the quarter-boat, as he fully imagined they would have to do, thereby to reach some other island.