"You'll find it quite correct, Captain." He had uttered his
habitual phrases in his usual placid, breath-saving voice and stood
my hard, inquisitive stare sleepily without as much as a wink.

"Then let us trade," I said, turning my shoulder to him. "I see
you are bent on it."

I did not want an open scandal, but I thought that outward decency
may be bought too dearly at times. I included Jacobus, myself, the
whole population of the island, in the same contemptuous disgust as
though we had been partners in an ignoble transaction. And the
remembered vision at sea, diaphanous and blue, of the Pearl of the
Ocean at sixty miles off; the unsubstantial, clear marvel of it as
if evoked by the art of a beautiful and pure magic, turned into a
thing of horrors too. Was this the fortune this vaporous and rare
apparition had held for me in its hard heart, hidden within the
shape as of fair dreams and mist? Was this my luck?

"I think"--Jacobus became suddenly audible after what seemed the
silence of vile meditation--"that you might conveniently take some
thirty tons. That would be about the lot, Captain."

"Would it? The lot! I dare say it would be convenient, but I
haven't got enough money for that."

I had never seen him so animated.

"No!" he exclaimed with what I took for the accent of grim menace.
"That's a pity." He paused, then, unrelenting: "How much money