es to do so, which is both well-bred and virtuous. When
Rollo came up with the oil-skins they told him what had been
decided, and Rollo, the faithful, the expressionless, dropped his
eyelids, but he could not banish from his voice the wistfulness that
he might have been one to stay behind.

"Sometimes it _is_ best for a person to change his mind, sir," was
his sole comment.

Presently the little green dory drew away from _The Aloha_, and they
left her lying as much at her ease as if the phantom island before
her were in every school-boy's geography, with a scale of miles and
a list of the principal exports attached.

"If we had diving dresses, adon," Jarvo suggested, "we might have
gone down through the sluice and entered by the lagoon where the
submarines pass."

"Jove," said Amory, trying to row and adjust his pince-nez at the
same time, "Chillingworth will never forgive us for missing that."

"You couldn't have done it," shouted Little Cawthorne derisively,
from the deck of the yacht, "you didn't wear your rubbers. If
anybody sticks a knife in you send up a r-r-r-ocket!"

The landing, effected with the utmost caution, was upon a flat
stone already a few inches submerged by the rising tide. Looking up
at the jagged, beetling world above them their task appeared
hopeless enough. But Jarvo found footing in an instant, and St.
George and Amory pressed closely behind him, Rollo and little Akko
silently bringing up the rear and carrying the oil-skins. Slowly and
cautiously as they made their way it was but a few minutes until the
three standing on the deck, and Barnay open-mouthed in the dory, saw
the sinuous line of the five bodies twist up the tortuous course
considerably above the blazoned emblem of the White Blade.

In truth, with Jarvo to set light foot where no foot seemed ever
before to have been set, with Jarvo to inspect every twig and pebble
and to take sharp turns where no turn seemed possible, the ascent,
perilous as it was, proved to be no such superhuman feat as from
below it had appeared. But it seemed interminable. Even when the sea
lay far beneath them and the faces of the watchers on the deck of
_The Aloha_ were no longer distinguishable, the grim wall continued
to stretch upward, melting into the sky's late blue.

The afterglow laid a fair path along the water, and the warm dusk
came swiftly out of the east. At snail's pace, now with heads bent
to knees, now standing erect to draw themselves up