ries here if you'll tell me what you
know about Wildenai!"

But, at the name, the girl beside him had given a low cry of utter
amazement. She stopped short.

"Do you know it too, then?" she gasped. "How did you hear about it?"

"Oh, I've known it for years," replied Blair carelessly. "Some of it
I've known all my life. But look here now. Is it a bargain?--about your
helping me, I mean?"

Before he left her, an hour or so later, every detail had been arranged.
Miss Hastings had meekly agreed to return to the hotel in the morning.
Blair would pay her expenses and something he called a retaining fee
besides. That would make an extra fifty dollars,--she smiled to herself
in the dark,--a new winter suit at least, and perhaps one or two
matinees if she managed! All this for the information she could give him
about the island and its history. The various points in their contract
spun dizzily in her dazed brain. No spot known to legend to which it was
possible to conduct him should remain unvisited. Four hours out of every
day were pledged without fail to his interests. The rest of the time she
might have for her own work. It had all come about so unexpectedly,
and was altogether so extraordinary that, after he had gone, his new
employee, stretched uncomfortably upon a narrow cot in the tent of a
fellow teacher, spent the remainder of the night in imaginary interviews
with Eastern publishers regarding impossible royalties. She was far too
excited to sleep.

And, for a week, the arrangement worked very well,--almost too well.
Every day brought with it some new adventure, and every adventure became
a pleasure.

Mounted at Blair's expense on more or less energetic ponies, for from
the first he had insisted that horses were a necessary part of their
business equipment, they cantered gaily along the shady canyon trails,
or over the sunlit slopes sheeted in pale lavender wherever the wild
lilacs were in bloom. Often, emerging from some thicket of dwarf
oak they caught glimpses of a sapphire sea held between red, twisted
branches of manzanita as in a frame. About them rang the music of the
meadow larks. Merry shouts of bathers floated up from the beaches far
below, mingled with the distant click of golf balls on the greens.

For the whole of a golden day they chartered a sailboat from one, Capt.
Warren, and rounding the yellow headlands under his lazy guidance, they
went to examine the Ning Po, the ancient Chinese barge strand