I laughed, and at the same time I accidentally dropped Rosa’s jewel-case, which had never left my hand. I picked it up hurriedly.

“You seem attached to that case,” the young man said, smiling. “If we had foundered, should you have let it go, or tried to swim ashore with it?”

“The question is doubtful,” I replied, returning his smile. In shipwrecks one soon becomes intimate with strangers.

“If I mistake not, it is a jewel-case.”

“It is a jewel-case.”

He nodded with a moralizing air, as if reflecting upon the sordid love of property which will make a man carry a jewel-case about with him when the next moment he might find himself in the sea. At least, that was my interpretation of the nodding. Then the brother and sister —