A Hero for Leanda

three this afternoon!”
    “Oh, good! Who did you talk to?”
    “His A.D.C.—a naval commander named Fletcher... Have you found anything about Kastella?”
    “Not a word. For all the interest this paper takes, he might not be on the island at all.”
    “Perhaps he isn’t,” Conway said solemnly. “Perhaps they’ve moved him somewhere else.”
    “You’re not serious!” Leanda looked really worried. Conway smiled. “You do rise, don’t you? No, I think he’s here, all right—it’s just that he isn’t news after all this time.... Now let’s see if we can find somewhere bearable for lunch.”

    Government House, they learned, lay some distance out of the town, so at three o’clock they hired a taxi to take them there. The road soon began to climb out of the urban huddle, but the slummy aspect of the view remained. Since there was little level ground to build on, the shacks were now perched precariously on piles of stone and on timber stilts. With their untidy coconut thatch and ramshackle walls and patches of rusty iron, they looked to Conway more like something that Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer might have run up for fun as a weekend camp. On the beaten ground around them, black babies with bare bottoms groveled in the dust, and scraggy dogs and chickens picked and foraged in the garbage. Tall mangoes and breadfruit trees, bananas and bamboos, shaded, but scarcely cloaked, the squalor. A faint smell of open drains hung over the hillside. They passed an old man smoking a pipe on a doorstep, who scarcely raised his eyes, and some young women pounding clothes on a rock, and a modest young man soaping himself over his shorts at a standpipe. Then the huts thinned out and there was a stretch of unspoiled country with rock-strewn gulleys and trickling streams and lush ferns. Presently more houses appeared—neat houses, with verandas, on concrete bases; and modern bungalows like Ionides’ home in Mombasa , with fences and gates and garages and an air of prosperity. In a few moments they were entering the grounds of the governor’s residence—a long, white, attractive building, with a veranda supported on columns, and a garden with flowering shrubs and a terrace, and lawns of close-cut grass that looked green and pleasant to their sea-accustomed eyes. Someone, they saw, had been playing croquet....
    They had barely given their names to the white-coated servant when a handsome, burly man advanced across the hall with outstretched hand. “Hullo,” he said cordially, “glad you were able to come. I’m Fletcher.... Come on in. H. E.’s looking forward to meeting you.”
    They preceded him into a large, light room with statuary in the comers and portraits of the Queen and Winston Churchill on opposite walls. A slim, graying man of sixty or so, in shorts and a bush shirt, rose from a desk to greet them. Fletcher said, “Mr. and Mrs. Michael Cornford... Sir George Hollis.”
    “Well, this is a very pleasant surprise,” the governor said, as they sat down. “We don’t see many new faces here except when the mail steamers arrive, and heaven knows that isn’t very often. I hear you’ve sailed from Africa in your own yacht?”
    Conway nodded. “We were actually making for the Seychelles but we ran short of fresh food so we decided to put in here for supplies.”
    “Yes, I see.... I’m sorry my wife isn’t here. She has a hospital committee this afternoon, but she’ll certainly want to meet you.... How long do you expect to stay?”
    “Oh, perhaps a week or two,” Conway said. “We’re hoping to make a round trip—on to the Seychelles and back via Mauritius —but we’re not pressed for time.”
    “A holiday trip, eh?” Hollis was looking at Leanda with interest and appreciation.
    Leanda smiled. “We’re refugees from the English winter, Sir George.”
    “Very nice, too, Mrs. Cornford—and most enterprising. How would you like to do that trip, Fletcher?”
    “Not me,” the commander said. “Never could stand the sea! I like my comforts.”
    “Well, they neither of them look as though they’ve come to any harm,” Hollis said. “How big is your yacht, Cornford?”
    “About eight tons,” Conway told him.
    “My word, she is small, isn’t she... ? Did you have a good passage?”
    “It couldn’t have been better—we came across like a train.”
    “H’m—well, this is quite an occasion. I’d like to have a look at your ship sometime. I do a little sailing myself, when I can get away