He glanced at me keenly. "Isn’t that wholly beside the point?" said he "I don’t believe the island exists to-day, if that is what you mean. But there’s a year in an open boat, back at the beginning of the record, to be explained. The point is that he believes in the island. By Jove, he remembers it—do you understand? See that droop in his back, as he stands absently looking out of the door? He’s growing old, and the woman would be past middle age to-day, and the boy would be a man; but they have a trick of remaining young in his memory. Oh, he faces the fact, of course, in his practical moments; wonders what they have come to, whether the boy ever matured, whether the woman waited, or gave him up for lost and married another man. He can speak about these things, because he’s quite determined to believe that the island is sunk under the ocean, that they’re all dead. But when the moon’s out, and he gets to dreaming, they come back to him just as he left them, a young and beautiful woman with a child at her breast, both of them perfectly alive. How can you ask me ... whether I believe in the island?" *IV* The day following this conversation, Nichols introduced me to Devereux; I met and talked with him several times before I left Hong Kong. If he was mad, the fact didn’t affect his daily intercourse. He was a man of charming personality; a man who held something back, of course, but this merely added interest to the charm. Only his eyes were strange; as he talked, they invariably wandered upward, and were recalled to the scene in intermittent sharp flashes. Then I left Hong Kong, and forgot all about him for a couple of years. At the end of that time I found myself in Batavia on business, when who should arrive but Nichols in the barque _Omega_. I left a message for him at his broker’s, and that evening he called on me at the hotel. Already, I had determined to ask him for a passage north. "But it’ll take me a couple of months to reach Hong Kong" he told me "I’m going from here to Macassar, then on up the straights to Cebu and Iloilo" "Time is no object to me" I answered. "Good" said he "I’ll be glad enough of your company. I have one passenger already, but he’s hardly exhilarating. It’s Devereux—you remember him. The fellow who lost an island in the Pacific" "Yes, indeed. How is he now?" "He’s in bad shape" said Nichols, tapping his head significantly "I’ve had him aboard the round trip, for his health, but it hasn’t seemed to help him. I’m afraid he is really breaking up, this time" So it was arranged that I accompany Nichols northward. I went off on board with him that night, to enjoy the fresh sea-breeze in the outer roads. There I renewed my acquaintance with Devereux in more intimate circumstances.