"You are extremely kind, Mr. Goodhart."

"But you will naturally wish to return to England to follow your profession in that country."

"Why?"

"Your wife is in England."

Reynolds shook his head. Goodhart smiled.

"We were just now talking of purpose in colour," said he, breaking from a subject that might have easily been made painful by even a nuance of insistence. “I have often asked myself, to what degree is colour necessary as a fibre or thread in the woof of matter? The solar light is formed of coloured rays, visible and invisible, and by and in that light does Creation move and have its being. But is colour essential as a constituent of matter? For instance, is colour a part of the flower's life, so that in the absence of colour the flower would need something as necessary to its being as any formative condition of its existence? Or, restricting myself to the flower, is it painted merely to delight? If so, for whose delight is it coloured? Is it to be supposed that the sole purpose of colour is to gratify the æsthetic sense in man? That colour is a created thing, whose existence is independent of human sensation, is too clear to need talking about. If visually we know that colour is a concomitant of state or change, we have a right to infer that colour is an abiding quality in coloured matter, and that the conditions under which it accompanies all mutations render it inseparable from matter; a property, therefore, indwelling in objects both in darkness and light."

"You mean," said Reynolds, "that if, for example, you carried a red rose into a black room, it would retain its colour?"

“I mean,” answered Goodhart, "that the cause of

the redness remains in the rose in the black room, and what is that cause but colour?"

"It seems to me," said Reynolds, "that the causes of colour consist of three things; first, the solar light; secondly, the selective properties of the coloured objects; thirdly, the human eye. Extinguish one of these things, and you extinguish colour. In this way, perhaps, it may be shown that colour is as much a property of the object that possesses it as of the light that reveals it or the eye that beholds it."

"I cannot allow your red rose to lose its glory," said Goodhart, "simply because you can't see it. For example, take a glass of port and a glass of sherry into a black cellar. Taste them. You will recognize each one by its flavour. If the flavour is present, why not the colour? There are certain crystals, forms of fluorspar, which, though they have remained buried for centuries in the earth, have, nevertheless, what has been termed a 'potentiality of light' locked up in them. Do you hold that that potential light is not light until you see it?"

"You want to corner me," said Reynolds, smiling, "by forcing me to admit that the extent of creation cannot be limited by our knowledge of its existence through our sensations. But what other guides have we? If I can't see colour or light, it has no being so far as I am concerned."

"But the sun shines, and the rose is red, though the blind man sees neither. Snow is melted by those rays of the sun which are invisible. Those rays may be made visible by a process called calorescence. Do they not exist as a part of the sun's light because you can't see them?"

"Pardon me, Mr. Goodhart, but isn't there a smack of sophistry in this reasoning?"

Goodhart smiled. It was evident that he talked rather to divert than to convince his companion.

"You doubtless remember," said he, "Tyndall's noble illustration of the invisibility of light. He took a box like a photographic camera: either side was pierced with a little window. He allowed all the floating particles in the atmosphere contained in the box to be deposited. He then darted a powerful electric beam through the windows. The light streamed in brilliance to one window, passed in blackness through the box, and flashed through the other window with the splendour with which it had entered. Thus that great man proved that light, which renders all things visible, is itself invisible." He added, pleasantly smiling, "We must place but little confidence in our sensations."

Now what should seem stranger than that two shipwrecked men, one of whom slept in a cave whilst the other took his rest in a fissure in a dell, should be found upon a little island seated on a grassy rise in the shade, discussing abstract problems of science with as much sincerity as if they were going up for an examination, with their chance of deliverance from their awful position so feeble as to entitle them to a habit of mental prostration? But in the human mind there is latent a power of philosophy which almost unconsciously helps it to adapt itself to any state it may chance to be in without violent departure from old habits or forms of thought. Suppose two maids-of-honour flung ashore from the sea, why should not they at intervals talk of drawing-rooms, presentations, the duchess's red face, the blazing fat throat of Lady Throgmorton Street? things it is true of a past more or less recent, but topics of habitual inspiration nevertheless. Two stock-jobbers

similarly cast up by the deep might be expected in the pauses between the meal of mussels and the search for something more digestible, to talk of loans and mines, of Goschen's year, and the prospects of Japan. Our two companions loved science, and from time to time, as we see, there was nothing in shipwreck to stop them from talking about it.

But their story, after a brief passage of rest, was to change suddenly into the eventful.

CHAPTER IX

THE CHASE

N the 2nd October, making it rather more than a fortnight since the arrival of the boat's crew, a man named Lydiart, being the first to awaken, quitted the cave and came into the open, where he yawned and stretched his arms, and then slowly looked around him. It was blowing what sailors would call a royal breeze. Wings of dusky cloud sailed under the sky. The east was a moist purple and the clouds came out of it stained with that tint; but before they gained the central heaven they changed into greys and browns with their skirts gilt by the sun. The stretch of coral sand was noisy with breakers which charged in cannon-shocks and receded sweating, cruelly fingering long black lines of weed as though they were tresses of the land they were seeking to tear off; and the ocean was filled with lighted lines of seas whose edgings of foam ran athwart in parallel archings till the whole surge sank in its own splendour of whiteness. Loud was the organ-thunder rolling from the stern abrupt which the island opposed to the sea south-east. The little piece of land was full of the music of the morning; and the sea-birds glanced as they wheeled and slanted from dark shapes into bright.

A second man came out of the cave. He was grim with a fortnight's growth of hair on face and head.