Three days later at noon the Humming Top, with thick oily smoke pouring from her funnel, was getting up steam and awaiting her pilot. Alexander Ewing, a grim happy Ewing, was down in the engine-room. For days he had been stimulating the hunger of a market by exiguous sales at the most appalling of prices; when money failed he graciously accepted pearl—at his own valuation. Reflecting now upon his work, he saw that it had been very good. And since the financial risk had been laid to account of Sir John Toppys and all the profits were divisible between himself and Ching, no thought of dividends payable to the Idle Rich obtruded to mar his pure satisfaction. He had become, by exercise of his own brains, a profiteer and a capeetalist—and the world was a very pleasant place. But though conscious of well-doing, his great mind had been for a while slightly disturbed by two exasperating thoughts. In a moment of expansive generosity, while receiving the congratulations of Madame upon his commercial abilities, he had presented her with a large pearl. He did not grudge a present to one whom he loved—and in his queer fashion he really loved Madame Gilbert—but it had been an unnecessarily large pearl. A smaller one would have earned for him as sweet a smile of thanks. Alexander hated an over-payment. And he never could forget that five per cent. for the officers and men which Madame had wrung from his grip. Even as he rejoiced in his gains, and counted them over in his recollection, that five per cent.—a whole shilling in every pound sterling—worried him dreadfully. It was as bad as an income tax. He wondered how Madame would take a proposal that some charge under the head of a "management expenses" should be debited against that five per cent. If a labourer were worthy of reward for his bodily toil, surely Alexander Ewing should be conceded some adequate remuneration for the wor-r-k of his br-r-ains.

And while he reflected upon the flies which always will defile the most perfect human ointment, an inspiration came to him. Only really great business minds are favoured in this way. He saw that he might make good the cost of Madame's excessively large pearl, and recover no small portion of that scandalous five per cent., by judicious wangling of the accounts. It was an operation which promised almost infinite possibilities, a simple operation seeing that no one except himself had any grasp of the true principles of finance. A grievous load lifted from his mind. God was in His Heaven—luckily a long way off—and all was right with the world. Human happiness is so rare that one loves to contemplate it unalloyed. I figure to myself Alexander Ewing, in his engine-room, grimly and perfectly happy.

It was at slack water, at the moment when the tide turning began to run eastwards through the Straits, that Willatopy's yawl hove in sight, and he bore down in his usual impetuous style. He had not come before, he explained to the gloomy Skipper, because it was absurd to waste steam by forcing the yacht against a five or six knot current. An hour or two of delay had turned that current to one of equal velocity in the Humming Top's favour, and he was prepared forthwith to make up, and more than make up, for the apparent procrastination. Ching, who was sick of Thursday Island, and had wanted to get away at daybreak whatever might have been the state of the tide, was obliged to admit the force of so seamanlike an explanation, but he did not love the "Moor" any better for presenting it. In his view a coloured man's place was the stokehole, not the bridge, and most certainly not the cabin. He detested the favour which Willatopy had gained on board the Humming Top and scorned his pretensions to be a member of the House of Toppys. When the fathers have for generations played the merry three-legged game—Plymouth, Slave Coast, West Indies, Plymouth—a black skin remains a covering for merchandise in the eyes of the children, even in the Twentieth Century.

Fully a hundred miles interposed between Thursday Island and the "miles and miles of shore and forest" which were the home of Willatopy. Between lay a labyrinth of coral, for the most part uncharted, of which he alone in the yacht had the secret. Ching might call him a Moor and detest his presence on the sacred bridge, but Ching knew, better perhaps than anyone else, that the safety of yacht and of all who sailed therein rested in the brown hands of the half-caste boy. By unchallengeable right, Willatopy conned the ship while her lawful commander glowered below in the chart-room. If he had not put the yacht aground away yonder on the fringes of the Warrior Reef, Ching would still have believed in his own capacity, somehow by rule of thumb and lead, to navigate his own vessel. Now he knew that he couldn't, and that Willatopy could, but he grudged the boy the skill which was denied to himself. It was very absurd, and I am really rather ashamed of my compatriot of Devon. No seaman can have precise local knowledge of all waters everywhere. Ching would have subordinated himself without a murmur to an authorised pilot in the Thames or the Scheldt. What irked him was to play second fiddle before Madame Gilbert to a wholly unauthorised Moor. It was no consolation to Ching to know, as did everyone else in the yacht, that Willatopy had swum in these Straits before he could walk, and had sailed them before he could talk. They were his own back yard, and there was nothing specially commendable in the precision of his acquaintance with them. He had, it is true, more than a mere accumulation of local knowledge; he had a sure sea instinct. But that came to him by inheritance on both sides of the house. Daily habit, inspired by instinct, had made him the ideal pilot whom Ching should have hugged to his bosom on the bridge instead of cursing under his feet in the chart-room. But it was all the same to Willatopy. He had never been in sole charge of a big steamer before, and he joyously played with the yacht as any boy would. He loved to drive her at full speed, to tickle her sensitive steam steering gear with his pretty little telegraph, and to watch the whole length of her sweep round corners where a fractional misjudgment would have ripped the bilge keels off her frames.

Alexander Ewing highly approved of the methods of Willatopy. He hated what he called backing and filling. He liked his engines to be kept running at a sound steady speed, and not to be perpetually bothered with stopping and reversing and forcing the propellers to make good the deficiencies of the rudder. With Willatopy in command, the Humming Top drove along as if coral reefs did not exist, and as if the deep water channels had been never less than a mile wide. He never ran into difficulties, because for him there were no difficulties.

They lay up that night, and picking up the eastward current again early in the morning, ramped up to Tops Island at a speed to which the cautious Ching had not yet become reconciled. Madame was on the boat deck watching the thickly wooded island rise up with the sun out of the sea. It was no low coral atoll, but a fine volcanic lump of basalt towering six hundred feet out of the water, and clothed with green woods up to the summits of the hills. As the yacht approached the shores she saw a multitude of pretty little coves bounded by rocky headlands and fringed with white coral sand. Here and there groves of cocoa-nut palms delicately skirted the sea edge, while patches of the devouring mangrove ran right into the salt water, and won back to the land wide stretches which the sea had covered. Madame had seen many islands in the Straits, but this Island of Tops came most near to the realisation of her imaginative dreams of the South Seas. It was in truth an Island of Dreams, and Will Toppys, madman and saint, had chosen well when he built his hut upon it, and pegged out his claim upon hundreds of acres of shore and woodland. To the north-east, as they slipped along the coast, appeared the entrance to a long narrow bay—described by Alexander as "just a wee Scots loch"—of which the whole line of shore to the left was owned by Willatopy.

I do not know the dimensions of the Estate of Toppys. Willatopy's ideas of space were as vague as his ideas of time—one was miles and miles, the other hours and hours—but from what Madame told me it must have run to a thousand acres at the least. There was more than a mile of shore to Willatopy's front garden, and the natural park at the back—called by Alexander the policies—extended up the hillside for another mile or so. I don't suppose that the Honourable William Toppys paid very much for it. Grant of Thursday Island, who has all his papers, would know. Madame, who is much more interested in people than in their possessions, never troubled to enquire about the property, and proved to be quite useless as an authority upon it. Alexander Ewing, with whom I had much intimate conversation before I ventured upon the details of this story, declared dogmatically at first that it was "about twa squar-r-e miles." On cross-examination he admitted that "the policies" had no ring fence, and that he had never explored their alleged boundaries. Though I love to be particular, and refused to describe the Humming Top until Denny's of Dumbarton had sent me a scale plan of her—which they very kindly and obligingly did—I have not troubled Mr. Robert Grant. For one thing he is too far away, and for another—before I have done, the other reason will be clear to the discerning reader.

The narrow bay, the "wee Scots loch," bit deep into Tops Island, and across it had been piled up by the mountain streams a bar of mud and sand, a low wave-swept barrier. Though the yacht could not cross the bar, she could lie safely within the entrance to the bay, and under shelter from the prevailing trade wind—which at that season blew from the south-east, swelling up almost into a gale at midday and dying away to nothing shortly after sunset. The shore of the island was very steep, and Willatopy brought the yacht in to within a hundred yards of a thick clump of mangroves. He let go the bow anchor.

"The tide is now near the turn," said he, "and there is a rise of ten feet at high water. You had better run out another anchor seawards, and let her swing with the current."

"Thanks," growled Ching, rudely. "You can pilot me up the Straits, but you can't teach me anything about the mooring of a ship."

Willatopy turned away, and descended to the boat deck. He inspected the twenty-two-foot lifeboats with great care, and shook his head with emphasis. "No good, no damn good," said he.

"What is troubling you, Willie?" asked Madame.

"Those fool boats," grumbled he, "have rudders. They are no good for the surf. Look," he pointed to where half-a-mile from them the swell broke in huge curling rollers on the bar of Tops Island. "One can't hold a boat true in that surf with a bit of wood stuck on rudder pintles. If I took you in now when there is little water on the bar in a boat like that she would broach and roll over and over. And the sharks are watching there for the meal that they would get. If you don't want to be food for sharks, Madame, you trust to Willatopy."

"For days past," said she, "our lives have been in your hands, Willie, and you have not failed us. Show us what we should do."

Willatopy beckoned to the second officer and explained that he wanted the rudder to be unshipped from one of the lifeboats and a strong eye of rope lashed to the top of the sternpost. It was to take a steering sweep, and to be very, very strong. "I take Madame in through the surf," he added.

"The devil you do," said the officer, gazing upon the huge foaming rollers, whose thunder as they broke upon the bar made conversation difficult. "Will it not be safer to wait till high water?"

"No," returned Madame calmly. "I go now—with Willatopy."

"If you go I shall go too. Though it seems to me just foolishness. At high water it would be easy."

"Yes," assented Willatopy. "Quite easy. There is a channel inshore which you could pass in the motor boat. It is only now at low water that the surf breaks heavily like that."

"No," repeated Madame firmly. "Where Willatopy leads, I follow. Make ready and be quick about it."

The second officer lashed on the eye of rope himself, and tested carefully the fitting of the longest sweep that he could find. He had pledged himself to share Madame's risks, but he was not going to take more chances than he could help. When he had finished the job, Willatopy passed it as very good.

"I could steer you over the bar of the Fly River with that," said he, "and the surf up north is not like those little breakers."

The "little breakers" were rearing their heads fifteen or twenty feet above the sea level, and crashing down in a welter of foam which stretched as far into the bay as they could see. The little breakers were big enough for Madame and the second officer, though Willatopy made light of them.

The officer climbed into the boat, in which six sailors stood ready to swing out and lower. Madame was about to follow when Willie checked her. He looked with disapproval at her graceful white muslin dress and shook his frizzy head.

"It will be very wet," said he. "I go like this."

In a moment the shirt and trousers of civilisation dropped from him, and he stood up a bare, naked savage. When Roger Gatepath first met Willatopy he had feathers in his hair and a bootlace about his middle; now Madame beheld him without either the feathers or the bootlace.

"Whew!" whistled the second officer.

"I cannot quite follow your admirable example," said Madame, smiling, "but if you will wait a moment I will dress the part of surf bather."

She ran down to her cabin, whipped off her clothes, wriggled into a blue silk bathing dress, and above it buckled a light linen trench coat. In this garb she did not mind how much water came aboard. Indeed afterwards the bathing dress and the trench coat became her standard wear while braving the surf of the Islands.

"Will this do, Willie?" asked Madame upon her return to the deck.

He surveyed her gravely. "My sisters would have thrown off their petticoats."

"But I am not your sister," answered Madame, climbing into the boat.

Willatopy followed, and was observed to tuck the discarded shirt and trousers carefully under the stern sheets. He had wrapped them up in a bit of sea cloth.

The boat was swung out and lowered, and the six sailors bent to their oars. Willatopy standing upright on a thwart firmly grasped the eighteen-foot sweep, and flicked the boat this way and that to test her response to his will. He appeared to be satisfied, for his lips opened in a grin of sheer boyish enjoyment.

"Give way," cried Willatopy.

Madame Gilbert, thorough in all that she undertook, had gone right forward, and, seated firmly, gripped a thwart with both hands. She was sure that Willatopy would hold the boat true in the surf, but she felt some small apprehension lest she might herself be pitched out into the mouths of those hungry waiting sharks. At about a hundred yards from the bar, Willatopy cried to the men to hold up the boat and await his orders. He was watching for the big roller which comes at fairly regular intervals, and which was the one to sweep them forward on the furious race through the surf.

"Now," he roared, and the lifeboat rushed upon the bar.

Madame felt her lift, lift, lift until the boat seemed to be poised upon a steep swiftly moving roof edge. She looked forward into the depths of an enormous hollow; she looked back to where Willatopy stood, naked as when he was born, his hands frozen upon the big sweep, the happy grin upon his joyful face. Time stood still. They were travelling at a full twenty knots, but it seemed ages before the lift of the boat ceased, and her bows fell to the level.

"Oars," cried Willatopy, and the men tossed them inboard.

The bows, with Madame clinging to her thwart, toppled steeply forward. The stern rose and rose until Willatopy, standing upright, and clutching the edge of the thwart with his bare, prehensile toes, towered over Madame's wet head. The surf all around boiled and roared and foamed over the gunwale. Madame low down got the worst of it, and wished that she had left that drenched linen coat in her cabin. The bathing dress was enough for decency, and was meant to be wetted. Down the hill of foaming water they raced faster, much faster, than they had climbed it, and always the line held true. Willatopy was always ready. He had played the game so often that his firmly planted swaying body met every jerk and strain of the struggling lifeboat, as if he knew exactly when to expect those desperate efforts to broach and roll over which are the obsession of boats in surf. At the foot of the hill of water Willatopy called again, and the men again obeyed promptly, falling to their oars, and driving the heavy boat down the bay. For half a mile they ran, still tossing through broken water, and Madame, picking the strands of copper hair out of her eyes, looked out towards the sandy beach towards which Willatopy was steering. He drove the boat right up on the sand, splashed over the side, and ran shouting up the beach. Instantly a pale brown figure emerged from the woods, another followed, and Willie was in the arms of two girls, who, save for their banana leaf petticoats, were as bare-skinned as himself. With an arm about the waist of each he marched off towards his home amid the trees. Madame was again forgotten. She, that proud beautiful white woman, was becoming used to being forgotten.

But presently Willatopy came back, and with him walked his mother, the Hula woman of Bulaa whom the Hon. William Toppys had made his lawful wife. Madame advancing looked at her curiously. Although the half-blooded daughters wore nothing but the native petticoats, the mother was clad in a white European blouse and skirt of cotton. She may have put them on for the dignity of the Family, but Madame thinks that she always went clothed.

"This is my mother," said Willatopy proudly. Madame held out her hands, and the native woman came to her, shyly at first, and then eagerly as she drew courage from the sweet irresistible smile of welcome on the most beautiful face in the world. She took both Madame's hands and knelt at her feet.

"No," said Madame Gilbert. "Here," and lifting the poor shy, humble creature in her strong arms, she took her to the wet trench coat and kissed her on both cheeks.

And that is how Madame Gilbert came to Tops Island. One may well ask what Sir John Toppys, Baronet of Wigan, the entirely neglected paymaster of Madame's most expensive expedition, would have thought of that pretty little scene.