heaven--hey, sir?"

Mr Jones, being directly addressed, took up his part in the concerted
piece:

"Really, when I saw a wharf on what might have been an uninhabited
island, I couldn't believe my eyes. I doubted its existence. I thought
it was a delusion till the boat actually drove between the piles, as you
see her lying now."

While he was speaking faintly, in a voice which did not seem to belong
to the earth, his henchman, in extremely loud and terrestrial accents,
was fussing about their belongings in the boat, addressing himself to
Pedro:

"Come, now--pass up the dunnage there! Move, yourself, hombre, or I'll
have to get down again and give you a tap on those bandages of yours,
you growling bear, you!"

"Ah! You didn't believe in the reality of the wharf?" Heyst was saying
to Mr. Jones.

"You ought to kiss my hands!"

Ricardo caught hold of an ancient Gladstone bag and swung it on the
wharf with a thump.

"Yes! You ought to burn a candle before me as they do before the saints
in your country. No saint has ever done so much for you as I have, you
ungrateful vagabond. Now then! Up you get!"

Helped by the talkative Ricardo, Pedro scrambled up on the wharf, where
he remained for some time on all fours, swinging to and fro his shaggy
head tied up in white rags. Then he got up clumsily, like a bulky animal
in the dusk, balancing itself on its hind legs.

Mr Jones began to explain languidly to Heyst that they were in a pretty
bad state that morning, when they caught sight of the smoke of the
volcano. It nerved them to make an effort for their lives. Soon
afterwards they made out the island.

"I had just wits enough left in my baked brain to alter the direction
of the boat," the ghostly voice went on. "As to finding assistance,
a wharf, a white man--nobody would have dreamed of it. Simply
preposterous!"

"That's what I thought when my Chinaman came and told me he had seen a
boat with white men pulling up," said Heyst.

"Most extraordinary luck," interjected Ricardo, standing by anxiously
attentive to every word. "Seems a dream," he added. "A lovely dream!"

A silence fell on that group of three, as if everyone had become afraid
to speak, in an obscure sense of an impending crisis. Pedro on one side
of them and Wang on the other had the air of watchful spectators. A few
stars had come out pursuing the ebbing twilight. A light draught of air
tepid enough in the thickening twilight after the scorching day,