like people going about.... Sounds like
anything you fancy."

He retired up the staircase again. "I s'pose I shall keep on goin' round
this blessed island," he said drearily. "Round and round and round."

He found himself presently beside the less damaged Asiatic aeroplane
again. He stared at it and the kitten smelt it. "Broke!" he said.

He looked up with a convulsive start.

Advancing slowly towards him out from among the trees were two tall
gaunt figures. They were blackened and tattered and bandaged; the
hind-most one limped and had his head swathed in white, but the foremost
one still carried himself as a Prince should do, for all that his left
arm was in a sling and one side of his face scalded a livid crimson. He
was the Prince Karl Albert, the War Lord, the "German Alexander," and
the man behind him was the bird-faced man whose cabin had once been
taken from him and given to Bert.

6

With that apparition began a new phase of Goat Island in Bert's
experience. He ceased to be a solitary representative of humanity in a
vast and violent and incomprehensible universe, and became once more a
social creature, a man in a world of other men. For an instant these two
were terrible, then they seemed sweet and desirable as brothers. They
too were in this scrape with him, marooned and puzzled. He wanted
extremely to hear exactly what had happened to them. What mattered it if
one was a Prince and both were foreign soldiers, if neither perhaps had
adequate English? His native Cockney freedom flowed too generously for
him to think of that, and surely the Asiatic fleets had purged all such
trivial differences. "Ul-LO!" he said; "'ow did you get 'ere?"

"It is the Englishman who brought us the Butteridge machine," said the
bird-faced officer in German, and then in a tone of horror, as Bert
advanced, "Salute!" and again louder, "SALUTE!"

"Gaw!" said Bert, and stopped with a second comment under his breath. He
stared and saluted awkwardly and became at once a masked defensive thing
with whom co-operation was impossible.

For a time these two perfected modern aristocrats stood regarding the
difficult problem of the Anglo-Saxon citizen, that ambiguous citizen
who, obeying some mysterious law in his blood, would neither drill nor
be a democrat. Bert was by no means a beautiful object, but in some
inexplicable way he looked resistant. He wore his cheap suit of serge,
now showing many signs of wear, and its loose fit made hi