to look up. It was a wholly
indifferent gaze; I am confident that she was no more aware of me
than if I had been one of the veranda posts which her eyes bad
chanced to encounter. But in the indescribable sensation of that
moment I felt that here was a woman who bore a secret burden,
although, as my informing host put it, her heart had romantically
found its haven only two weeks ago.

She was endeavouring to get trace of a man named Farquharson, as I
was permitted to learn a few days later. Ostensibly, it was Major
Stanleigh who was bent on locating this young Englishman--Miss
Stanleigh's interest in the quest was guardedly withheld--and the
trail had led them a pretty chase around the world until some clue,
which I never clearly understood, brought them to Port Charlotte.
The major's immediate objective was an eccentric chap named Leavitt
who had marooned himself in Muloa. The island offered an ideal
retreat for one bent on shunning his own kind, if he did not object
to the close proximity of a restive volcano. Clearly, Leavitt did not.
He had a scientific interest in the phenomena exhibited by volcanic
regions and was versed in geological lore, but the rumours about
Leavitt--practically no one ever visited Muloa--did not stop at that.
And, as Major Stanleigh and I were to discover, the fellow seemed to
have developed a genuine affection for Lakalatcha, as the smoking
cone was called by the natives of the adjoining islands. From long
association he had come to know its whims and moods as one comes to
know those of a petulant woman one lives with. It was a bizarre and
preposterous intimacy, in which Leavitt seemed to find a wholly
acceptable substitute for human society, and there was something
repellant about the man's eccentricity. He had various names for the
smoking cone that towered a mile or more above his head: "Old
Flame-eater," or "Lava-spitter," he would at times familiarly and
irreverently call it; or, again, "The Maiden Who Never Sleeps," or
"The Single-breasted Virgin"--these last, however, always in the
musical Malay equivalent. He had no end of names--romantic, splenetic,
of opprobrium, or outright endearment--to suit, I imagine,
Lakalatcha's varying moods. In one respect they puzzled me--they
were of conflicting genders, some feminine and some masculine, as if
in Leavitt's loose-frayed imagination the mountain that beguiled his
days and disturbed his nights were hermaphroditic.

Leavitt as a source of