was one of the few tributes Miss Pembroke ever paid to
imagination. But he felt that it did not belong to him: words so
sincere should be for Gerald alone. The smoke rushed up the
chimney, and he indulged in a vision. He saw it reach the outer
air and beat against the low ceiling of clouds. The clouds were
too strong for it; but in them was one chink, revealing one star,
and through this the smoke escaped into the light of stars
innumerable. Then--but then the vision failed, and the voice of
science whispered that all smoke remains on earth in the form of
smuts, and is troublesome to Mrs. Aberdeen.

"I am jolly unpractical," he mused. "And what is the point of it
when real things are so wonderful? Who wants visions in a world
that has Agnes and Gerald?" He turned on the electric light and
pulled open the table-drawer. There, among spoons and corks and
string, he found a fragment of a little story that he had tried
to write last term. It was called "The Bay of the Fifteen
Islets," and the action took place on St. John's Eve off the
coast of Sicily. A party of tourists land on one of the islands.
Suddenly the boatmen become uneasy, and say that the island is
not generally there. It is an extra one, and they had better have
tea on one of the ordinaries. "Pooh, volcanic!" says the leading
tourist, and the ladies say how interesting. The island begins to
rock, and so do the minds of its visitors. They start and quarrel
and jabber. Fingers burst up through the sand-black fingers of
sea devils. The island tilts. The tourists go mad. But just
before the catastrophe one man, integer vitce scelerisque
purus, sees the truth. Here are no devils. Other muscles, other
minds, are pulling the island to its subterranean home. Through
the advancing wall of waters he sees no grisly faces, no ghastly