“Yes,” said Lestrange, looking at the paper; “that is my advertisement.”

“Well, it’s strange—very strange,” said Captain Fountain, “that I should have lit on it only yesterday. I’ve had it all three years in my chest, the way old papers get lying at the bottom with odds and ends. Mightn’t a’ seen it now, only the missus cleared the raffle out of the chest, and, ‘Give me that paper,’ I says, seeing it in her hand; and I fell to reading it, for a man’ll read anything bar tracts lying in bed eight months, as I’ve been with the dropsy. I’ve been whaler man and boy forty year, and my last ship was the Sea-Horse. Over seven years ago one of my men picked up something on a beach of one of them islands east of the Marquesas—we’d put in to water——”

“Yes, yes,” said Lestrange. “What was it he found?”

“Missus!” roared the captain in a voice that shook the walls of the room.

The door opened, and the woman appeared.

“Fetch me my keys out of my trousers pocket.”

The trousers were hanging up on the back of the door, as if only waiting to be put on. The woman fetched the keys, and he fumbled over them and found one. He handed it to her, and pointed to the drawer of a bureau opposite the bed.

She knew evidently what was wanted, for she opened the drawer and produced a box, which she handed to him. It was a small cardboard box tied round with a bit of string. He undid the string, and disclosed a child’s tea service: a teapot, cream jug, six little plates—all painted with a pansy.

It was the box which Emmeline had always been losing—lost again.

Lestrange buried his face in his hands. He knew the things. Emmeline had shown them to him in a burst of confidence. Out of all that vast ocean he had searched unavailingly: they had come to him like a message, and the awe and mystery of it bowed him down and crushed him.

The captain had placed the things on the newspaper spread out by his side, and he was unrolling the little spoons from their tissue-paper covering. He counted them as if entering up the tale of some trust, and placed them on the newspaper.

“When did you find them?” asked Lestrange, speaking with his face still covered.

“A matter of over seven years ago,” replied the captain, “we’d put in to water at a place south of the line—Palm Tree Island we whalemen call it, because of the tree at the break of the lagoon. One of my men brought it aboard, found it in a shanty built of sugarcanes which the men bust up for devilment.”

“Good God!” said Lestrange. “Was there no one there—nothing but this box?”

“Not a sight or sound, so the men said; just the shanty abandoned seemingly. I had no time to land and hunt for castaways, I was after whales.”