words seemed to me to shed light. There was something wrong. But
if something was wrong, if young Siddons had come to some harm, how had
it happened? He must have had some motive in leaving a cutter with six
men to wait for him. As for my idiotic suggestion that he might have
gone on the booze, there wasn't a cafe within three miles that young
Siddons would enter. He must have had some plan. Of course we are told,
with wearisome insistence, to look for the woman; but we don't in real
life. We look for all sorts of motives before we look for the woman. And
even if I did in this instance suppose for a moment that Siddons had
gone off on some mysterious adventure involving say, Captain Macedoine's
daughter, I was no further advanced. He could hardly have told the
sailors to wait. It was against all traditions of the service. And as I
was deciding that he must have come to harm, and wondering how the deuce
I was to discover him, a light shone out for a moment above me, I saw a
figure silhouetted in a doorway and then vanish. Someone had gone in. I
started up the steep by-path to make enquiries. I knew the pilot, a
predatory person from Samos, had a hutch on the mountain somewhere, and
it occurred to me that he had negotiated the sale of a flask or two of
the sweetish wine of the island, and young Siddons had seized the
opportunity to get it aboard without the old man knowing it. Quite a
rational theory, I thought, as I toiled up the path getting short of
breath. And suddenly I came upon the door which had opened and closed, a
door in a house like a square white flat-topped box, with a window in
one side shedding a faint glow upon a garden of shrubs.

"And now I was in a quandary. I sat down on a bowlder to take a breath.
Supposing I knocked at the door and asked if any one had seen the Third
Mate, and the inhabitants had not seen him and couldn't understand me, I
should have done no good. And supposing they had seen him, or that he
was inside, I should have some difficulty in explaining my interest in
his private affairs. For I liked him, and we are always afraid of those
whom we like. It is not only that we fear to tarnish our own reputation
in their eyes, but we suffer a mingled terror and pleasure lest we
discover them to be unworthy of their exalted position in our
affections. So I got up and instead of knocking at the door I stepped
among the shrubs and came to the window. And sitting close against the
wall, with a smal