he lost the brake; and he's a pretty spectacle now, for he landed on his head. It was that beautiful old lady with the fly-away hair that we saw arrive from this morning's boat while we were sitting out smoking, you remember."

"Not that one!"

"That was the woman. Had a black maid with her. She's a Southerner. I looked on the register."

The other young fellow whistled.

"I'm glad I was at the links and didn't see it. She was a stunning woman."

Dusk stalked grimly down from eastern heights and blurred the water earlier than on rose-colored evenings, making the home-returning walker shiver through evergreen glooms along shore. The lights of the sleepy Old Mission had never seemed so pleasant, though the house was full of talk about that day's accident at the other side of the island.

I slipped out before the early boat left next morning, driven by undefined anxieties towards Madame Clementine's alley. There is a childish credulity which clings to imaginative people through life. I had accepted the blue man and the woman with floating hair in the way which they chose to present themselves. But I began to feel like one who sees a distinctly focused picture shimmering to a dissolving view. The intrusion of an accident to a stranger at another hotel continued this morning, for as I took the long way around the bay before turning back to Clementine's alley I met the open island hearse, looking like a relic of provincial France, and in it was a coffin, and behind it moved a carriage in which a black maid sat weeping.

Madame Clementine came out to her palings and picked some of her nasturtiums for me. In her mixed language she talked excitedly about the accident; nothing equals the islander's zest for sensation after his winter trance when the summer world comes to him.

"When I heard it," I confessed, "I thought of the friend of your blue gentleman. The description was so like her. But I saw her myself on the beach by the Giant's Stairway after four o'clock yesterday."

Madame Clementine contracted her short face in puzzled wrinkles.

"There is one gentleman of red head," she responded, "but none of blue—pas du tout."

"You must know whom I mean—the lodger who has been with you thirty-five years."

She looked at me as at one who has either been tricked or is attempting trickery.

"I don't know his name—but you certainly understand! The man I saw in that room at the foot of the stairs when you were showing my friend and me the chambers day before yesterday."

"There was nobody. De room at de foot of de stair is empty all season. Tout de suite I put in some young lady that arrive this night."

"Madame Clementine, I saw a man with a blue skin on the beach yesterday—" I stopped. He had not told me he lodged with her. That was my own deduction. "I saw him the day before in this house. Don't you know any such person? He has been on the island since that young lady was brought to your house with the cholera so long ago. He brought her to you."

A flicker of recollection appeared on Clementine's face.

"That man is gone, madame; it is many years. And he was not blue at all. He was English Jersey man, of Halifax."

"Did you never hear of any blue man on the island, Clementine?"

"I hear of blue bones found beyond Point de Mission."

"But that skeleton found in the hole near the Giant's Stairway was a woman's skeleton."

"Me loes!" exclaimed Madame Clementine, miscalling her English as she always did in excitement. "Me handle de big bones, moi-même! Me loes what de doctor who found him say!"

"I was told it was an Indian girl."

"You have hear lies, madame. Me loes there was a blue man found beyond Point de Mission."

"But who was it that I saw in your house?"

"He is not in my house!" declared Madame Clementine. "No blue man is ever in my house!" She crossed herself.

There is a sensation like having a slide pulled from one's head; the shock passes in the fraction of a