Let it be granted, then, that
I ought to have got up with stately grace and gone away. Only, I
did nothing of the sort. In spite of my exclusion from all its
material benefits, I had an amateur's appreciation of that map. I
felt that I should gloat over it. Perhaps of all those present I
alone, free from sordid hopes, would get the true romantic zest and
essence of it--

Covertly I watched the faces around me. Mr. Tubbs's eyes had grown
bright; he licked his dry lips. His nose, tip-tilted and slightly
bulbous, took on a more than usually roseate hue. Captain Magnus,
who was of a restless and jerky habit at the best of times, was
like a leashed animal scenting blood. Beneath his open shirt you
saw the quick rise and fall of his hairy chest. His lips, drawn
back wolfishly, displayed yellow, fang-like teeth. Under the
raw crude greed of the man you seemed to glimpse something
indescribably vulpine and ferocious.

The face of Dugald Shaw was controlled, but there was a slight
rigidity in its quiet. A pulse beat rapidly in his cheek. All
worldly good, all hope of place, power, independence, hung for him
on the contents of the small flat package, wrapped in oil-silk,
which Miss Browne was at this moment withdrawing from her pocket.

Only Cuthbert Vane, seated next to me, maintained without effort
his serenity. For him the whole affair belonged in the category
known as sporting, where a gentleman played his stake and accepted
with equanimity the issue.

As Miss Browne undid the oil-silk package everybody held his
breath, except poor Aunt Jane, who most inopportunely swallowed a
gnat and choked.

The dead sailor's legacy consisted of a single sheet of
time-stained paper. Two-thirds of the sheet was covered by a
roughly-drawn sketch in faded ink, giving the outline of the island
shores as we had seen them from the _Rufus Smith_. Here was the
cove, with the name it bears in the Admiralty charts--Lantern
Bay--written in, and a dotted line indicating the channel. North
of the bay the shore line was carried for only a little distance.
On the south was shown the long tongue of land which protects the
anchorage, and which ends in some detached rocks or islets. At a
point on the seaward side of the tongue of land, about on a line
with the head of the bay, the sketch ended in a swift backward
stroke of the pen which gave something the effect of a cross.

To all appearance the map was merely to give Hopperdown h