a night they said it was all to the good.
They grew very crafty in seamanship, and cunning in what they did, for
they knew that any news of the _Desperate Lark_'s old crew would bring
hangmen from the interior running down to every port.

And no one is known to have found them out or to have annexed their
island; but a rumour arose and passed from port to port and every
place where sailors meet together, and even survives to this day, of a
dangerous uncharted rock anywhere between Plymouth and the Horn, which
would suddenly rise in the safest track of ships, and upon which
vessels were supposed to have been wrecked, leaving, strangely enough,
no evidence of their doom. There was a little speculation about it at
first, till it was silenced by the chance remark of a man old with
wandering: "It is one of the mysteries that haunt the sea."

And almost Captain Shard and the Queen of the South lived happily ever
after, though still at evening those on watch in the trees would see
their captain sit with a puzzled air or hear him muttering now and again
in a discontented way: "I wish I knew more about the ways of Queens."

MISS CUBBIDGE AND THE DRAGON OF ROMANCE

This tale is told in the balconies of Belgrave Square and among the
towers of Pont Street; men sing it at evening in the Brompton Road.

Little upon her eighteenth birthday thought Miss Cubbidge, of Number
12A Prince of Wales' Square, that before another year had gone its way
she would lose the sight of that unshapely oblong that was so long her
home. And, had you told her further that within that year all trace of
that so-called square, and of the day when her father was elected by a
thumping majority to share in the guidance of the destinies of the
empire, should utterly fade from her memory, she would merely have
said in that affected voice of hers, "Go to!"

There was nothing about it in the daily Press, the policy of her
father's party had no provision for it, there was no hint of it in
conversation at evening parties to which Miss Cubbidge went: there was
nothing to warn her at all that a loathsome dragon with golden scales
that rattled as he went should have come up clean out of the prime of
romance and gone by night (so far as we know) through Hammersmith, and
come to Ardle Mansions, and then had turned to his left, which of
course brought him to Miss Cubbidge's father's house.

There sat Miss Cubbidge at evening on her balcony quite alone, waiting