It is difficult to find an excuse for Miss Matilda. She was a missionary's daughter, committed to the sacred cause of respectability in a far land. Motauri was a gentleman of sorts and a scholar after his own fashion, a high chief and a descendant of kings; but he was also a native and a pagan. Strictly, it should have been nothing to Miss Matilda that Motauri looked most distractingly like a young woodland god, with a skin the exact shade of new heather honey, the ringlets of a faun, the features of a Roman cameo and the build of a Greek athlete.

Being a chief in the flower valley of Wailoa meant that Motauri owned a stated number of cocoanut-trees and never had to do anything except to swim and to laugh, to chase the rainbow-fish a fathom deep and to play divinely on the nose-flute. But being as handsome as Motauri meant that many a maiden heart must sigh after him and flutter in strange, wild rhythm under the compelling of his gentle glance. This was all very well so long as the maidens were among his own people. It took a different aspect when he turned the said glance on Miss Matilda, who was white and slim and wore mitts to keep her hands from tanning and did crewelwork in the veranda of her father's house behind the splendid screen of the passion-vine....

Now falling in love with a man of color is distinctly one of the things that are not done—that scarcely endure to be spoken of. We have it on the very highest authority that the East has a stubborn habit of never being the West. Where two eligible persons of opposite sex are concerned the stark geographic, not to say ethnologic fact comes grimly into play, and never these twain shall meet: or anyway the world agrees they never ought.

Yet Miss Matilda had been meeting Motauri. Perhaps the passion-vine was to blame. The passion-vine is too exuberant to be altogether respectable. One cannot live in an atmosphere of passion-vine—and that embraces all the heady scent and vivid tint and soft luxuriance of the islands where life goes as sweetly as a song; the warm caress of the trade-wind, the diamond dance of spray; the throbbing organ-pipe of the reef, the bridal-veiling of mountain streams, the flaunting of palm and plantain, the twinkling signal of fireflies at dusk—one cannot live with all this and confine one's emotions to a conventional pattern of gray and blue worsted yarns. At least one has trouble in so doing while the thrill and spring of youth remain.

They remained with Miss Matilda, though guarded by natural discretion. Nothing could have been cooler than the gleam of her starched gingham, as she moved sedately down the mountain path to chapel of a Sunday morning. Nothing more demure than the droop of her lashes under the rim of the severe, Quakerish bonnet, as she smote the wheezy old melodeon for the dusky choir. In that flawless face, a little faded, a little wearied, you would have sought vainly for any hint of hard repression, for any ravaging of secret revolt—unless, like Hull Gregson, the trader, you had made a despairing study of it and had kept its image before your hot eyes throughout long, sleepless nights; unless, more particularly, like Motauri, you had been privileged to see it by the moonlight that sifts through the rifts of the passion-vine. Then, perhaps....

Certainly her excellent father would have been the last unprompted and of his own motion, to develop any such suspicion. Pastor Spener had learned to fight shy of so many suspicions, so many discomfortable questions. And this was well. Otherwise he might have been led to wonder occasionally at his own presence and his own work; at the whole imposed and artificial shadow of a bleak civilization upon these sunny isles, these last remnants of an earthly paradise.

He seldom permitted himself to wonder about anything except the singular inadequacy of mission support and the rising cost per head of making converts, and keeping them. But there were times when he chanced to consider, perhaps, some drunken derelict outsprawled by a hospitable breadfruit, or again some lovely sea-born creature of his flock, stumbling past in all the naive absurdity of Mother Hubbard and brogans—these were moments that brought doubt to the good pastor; moments when he glimpsed the unanswered problem of commingled races, of white exile and brown host, of lonely invader and docile subject.

"We have our little trials—" he said, and smoothed them rather fretfully, and as speedily as might be, from his pink, bald brow and laid them with the well-ordered weft of ungrayed hair atop.

For had he not also his mission, his infant class, his home, his books, his reports?—a whole solid and established institution from which to draw the protective formulae of respectability. Even in the lands of the passion-vine, the Pastor Speners will inevitably gather such formulae about them as a snail secretes its shell....

"Undeniably," he said, abstractedly, "we have our perplexities. Guidance is not always forthcoming in these matters. Would you take the little money we have put by—you remember we were going to purchase a new oil lamp for the chapel—would you take that money to buy yellow ribbons for Jeremiah's Loo?"

"Why does Jeremiah's Loo need ribbons?" asked Miss Matilda.

"She is going to marry that tramp shell-buyer from Papeete. At least she consents to a ceremony, if she can have the ribbons. A wild girl. I've never had much hold over her.... It would be in some sort a bribe, I admit—"

Father and daughter were seated in the arbored veranda at the daily solemn rite of tea. For many years Pastor Spener had been used to hold forth on sins and vanities at this hour before twilight. For many years the meek partner of his joys and sorrows had assisted there, dispensing the scant manna of dry toast and tapping the prim bulk of the tea-urn—that sure rock of respectability the world around. And since she had passed to the tiny cemetery on the hillside, it had not been easy to alter the patriarchal custom; not easy always to remember that the place across from him was now filled by another, a younger, and in the ways of the world and the flesh, a wholly innocent auditor.

Ordinarily Miss Matilda did little to remind him. Ordinarily she listened with the same meek deference. But Miss Matilda's state of mind for some time past had been very far from ordinary; it chanced that on this particular afternoon the private, the very private, affairs of Miss Matilda had brought her to a condition altogether extraordinary—almost reckless.

"You don't know the man," she suggested, "or anything about him."

He blinked.

"I don't—no. Nothing good."

"Still you are willing to marry them."

Now this was a clear departure, and a daring one, but considering all things perhaps not strange.

For the last thirty minutes, since the pastor's return from the village below, Miss Matilda had been conscious of a tension in the domestic air. Up to his mention of Jeremiah's Loo an oppressive silence had brooded, and from his manner of eyeing her over his teacup there was reason to fear that something more troublous than yellow ribbons had ruffled his pink serenity. If Miss Matilda had been the trembling kind she would have trembled now at her own temerity—the result of indefinable impulse. And yet when his answer came it was no rebuke, rather it was eager, with an unwonted touch of embarrassment.

"What would you have me do, my dear?" he said. "I can't pass judgment on these people. Our society is limited—largely primitive. How many months is it since you saw another white woman here in Wailoa, for instance? They wish to wed—that's enough."

"The man is white and the girl is a native, and you would marry them so readily?"

Miss Matilda put the query with perfect outward calm. The Reverend Spener himself was the one to clatter his cup.

"What would you have?" he repeated. "I marry them; yes. I will marry any that ask—barring known criminals—and only too thankful to lend religious sanction. Because—don't you see?—they are bound to marry anyhow. Matilda—" He brought up short and regarded her with sharpened concern, very curious for a man who was commonly so sure of himself. "My dear daughter, I don't believe I've ever explained this point to you before. It's not—er—it's a subject rather awkward to discuss. But since we've reached it, there is a need why I should intrude briefly upon your delicacy.... A very definite need."

If she gave a quick movement, it was only to set the tea-cozy in place. If there came a flush athwart her pale cheek, it might have been a chance ray of the deep western sun, filtering through the trellis.

"Yes?" she said.

"I am quite clear about these marriages. Quite clear. I cannot say I advocate them, but in any such community as ours they have always been inevitable. The missionary merely provides the service of the church, as in duty bound. Who shall deny that he does the Lord's work toward unifying the island type?" He blinked nervously, balked at his own lead and started again.

"As to any stigma that may attach to such a union—really, you know, it's not as if our natives had the least negroid taint. They are Caucasians. Yes, my dear, that is scientifically true. The Polynesian people are an early migration of the great Caucasian race. Besides which, they are very fair to look upon—undeniably—very fair indeed."

She sat transfixed, but the most amazing part was to come....

"Consider, moreover," he pleaded—actually it was as if he pleaded—"considered the position of the resident white in these isles, far from the restraints and manifold affairs of his own world. Life is apt to become very dreary, very monotonous for him. Ah, yes, Matilda, you could scarce imagine, but it palls—it palls. He requires—er—diversion, as it were, companionship, a personal share in such charm and—er—sensuous appeal as flourish so richly on all sides of him. Have you ever thought of the question in that light? You haven't, of course, my dear. But consider the temptation."

He ended by retreating hastily behind his teacup, quite unnecessarily, as it proved. Miss Matilda was in no condition just then to deploy the expected maidenly emotions. "Consider!" Had she not? Had she been thinking of anything else these past feverish weeks? What other exile could have taught any secrets of monotony or dreariness to the daughter of a lone missionary?

Chapel, school, home and chapel again, and in this round each daily move foreseen and prescribed. An hour for getting up and an hour for lying down; an hour for eating and an hour for praying; for turning a page and for threading a needle. No escape from the small formal proprieties in which her father had molded their lives. No friend, no neighbor, no acquaintance except native pupils and servants. No stimulus except the moral discourse of a reverend tyrant. No interests except the same petty worries and the same money needs....

From where she sat in the veranda she could see no single object to break the deadly sameness of it. There were the same sticks of unsuitable furniture in the same immutable order, the same rugs at the same angles; the same dishes, the same books, the same pictures on the walls—"The Prodigal's Return," chromolithograph, in a South Pacific isle! And all this not merely happening so, as it might very well happen elsewhere. Here it was laboriously achieved, a triumph of formulated rectitude, transplanted bodily for a reproof and an example to the heart of the riotous tropics....

"Why did you say there was need to explain to me, father?" she managed to ask at last.

But the pastor had had time to reform his lines.

"I spoke somewhat at large," he said, with a wave. "My specific purpose was to define an attitude which perhaps you may have mistaken—to warn you against undue intolerance, my dear. You see, as a matter of fact, I had a talk to-day on this same head—quite a helpful talk—with Captain Gregson."

For all her preoccupation with her own problems the name caught her with new astonishment.

"Gregson! The trader?"

"Captain," he repeated, significantly. "Captain Gregson."

"You talked with him?" she exclaimed. "But he—but you—I've heard you say—"

Thereupon Pastor Spener took the upper hand decisively, like one who has come off well in an anxious skirmish over difficult ground.

"Never mind what you have heard, my dear. Many things have been said of him—idle chatter of the beaches. He has been sadly misjudged. Captain Gregson is a very remarkable man, besides being the wealthiest in the islands—undeniably, quite the wealthiest.... He intends joining our church."

Miss Matilda rose from the table and moved away to the open side of the veranda, looking off to seaward. Tall, erect, with her hands resting on the high rail, she made a decorous and restful figure against the sunset sky. But those hands, so casual seeming, were driving their nails into the wood. For within the maiden breast of Miss Matilda, behind that obtrusive composure, there seethed a tumult of question, alarm, bewilderment....

This startling dissertation of her father's—she could not begin to think what it meant. Was it possible, in spite of all assurance, was it possible that he knew, had heard or guessed—about Motauri? And if he had, was it conceivable that he should speak so—to state, as it might be, the very terms of her guilt, an actual plea for that unnameable temptation to which she had been drifting? It was mad. She could no longer be sure of anything, of her safety, her purpose, her father, herself—truly, of herself. And Gregson! An evil presentiment had pierced her at his mention of the gross, dark, enigmatic trader, whose intent regard she had felt fixed upon her so often—whenever she met him on the village path or passed his broad-eaved house by the beach. What did it mean?

Through a gap in the passion-vine she gazed out and over the whole side of the mountain into the wide glory of the sunset. There was nothing to interrupt that full outward sweep, nothing between her and the horizon.

The parsonage at Wailoa could never have been placed or built by any one of the Reverend Spener's level temperament. He had never found anything but a grievance in the fact that he should have to dwell so far aloft from routine affairs in a spot of the wildest and most romantic beauty. The village itself lay hidden below and to the left, at the mouth of the valley, whence the smoke of its hearths rose as incense. Half-way up the winding track stood his little chapel in a grove of limes. And here on a higher terrace of the basalt cliff, like an eyrie—or, perhaps more fittingly, a swallow's nest—was perched the pastor's home. The lush growth of an untamed jungle massed up to its step; beetling heights menaced it from behind; and always, at all seasons, a rushing mountain torrent in the ravine beside made its flimsy walls to thrill, disturbing its peace with musical clamor.

That stream should have been indicted for trespass and disorder by the worthy pastor's way of thinking. Somehow all the unruly and wayward elements of his charge seemed to find expression in those singing waters, which were not to be dammed or turned aside. From the veranda-rail one might lean and toss anything—a passion-flower—into the current and follow it as it danced away down the broken slide, lost here and there amid mists and milky pools and the shadowing tangle of lianas snatched at last through a chute and over a sheer outfall, to reappear some minutes later as a spark in the fret of the surf far below.

Standing there at the verge of the world, Miss Matilda watched the day's end. For a time the bright gates stayed open at the end of an unrolled, flaming carpet across the sea, then slowly drew in, implacably swung to, while the belated spirit sprang hurrying forward—too late. With an almost audible brazen clang they closed, and Miss Matilda drew back, chilled, as the veranda shook to a heavy footfall....

"Ah, Captain Gregson—step up, sir!" Her father's voice was unctuous with welcome as he hastened to meet the ponderous bulk that loomed through the dusk. "Happily met, sir. You are just in time to join us at prayers. I believe you must know my daughter—Matilda?"

It was strange to hear the pastor use such a tone with such a visitor, and stranger still to see the assurance with which Captain Gregson entered the parsonage, where he had never until now set foot.

"Evening, Pastor. Just a moment. That path—pretty tough on a chap who's used—ship's deck as much as I have, d'y' see? Very kind, I'm sure. Very kind and neighborly. And this—Miss Matilda, if I may say so bold.... Very proud to know you, ma'am. Proud and happy."

He made her his bow, plying a broad straw hat and a billowy handkerchief of tussore silk. She found herself answering him. And presently—most singular thing of all—he had properly ensconced himself by the tall astral lamp like one of the family circle, balancing a Testament on his knee and reading his verse in turn with surprising facility....

Captain Hull Gregson was one of those men apparently preserved in lard, whose shiny, tanned skin seems as impervious as Spanish leather alike to age and to rude usage. But if his years were indeterminate, his eyes were as old as blue pebbles. By those eyes, as by his slow, forceful speech and rare gesture, as by a certain ruthless jut of jaw, was revealed the exploiter, the conquering white that has taken the South Pacific for an ordained possession.

He had led a varied and more or less picturesque career up and down the warm seas. He had been a copra buyer through black Melanesia in the open days; had owned his ships and sailed them after labor in the Archipelago with a price on his head and his life in his hand. And now, rich in phosphate shares and plantation partnerships, a sort of comfortable island squire, he had retired to peaceful Wailoa at last as a quiet corner where business was play and the hot roll dropped on time from the breadfruit-tree. So much was said of him, and it was not considered the part either of wisdom or of island etiquette to say much more—nor was much else required to set him in his place. Certainly he might have seemed somewhat out of it now. The type does not pervade the parlors of the missionaries as a rule.

But Captain Gregson turned it off very well. Once he had recovered his breath, and a purplish haze had cleared from his face, he comported himself easily, even impressively, neither belittling nor forcing the social event, the while that Pastor Spener beamed encouragement and smoothed a complacent brow....

"It's like I told you to-day, Pastor. The notion came to me like that—I've been a bad neighbor. There's so few of us marooned here, like. I said to myself—where's the use of being strangers, hey? Why not get neighborly with those good folks and help along that good work of faith and righteousness. Why not, hey—?"

He spoke with an effect of heartiness that delighted the Reverend Spener, and that fell on the ear of the Reverend Spener's daughter as hollow as a drum.

"Why not, indeed?" echoed the pastor.

"So many places you find a kind of feud betwixt the commercial people and the mission people," continued Captain Gregson. "Where's the sense of it? I believe in you, Pastor, and your work and your church. Yes, and I feel the need of the church myself, and a chance to visit a fine respectable home like this.... Why shouldn't I have it?"

Miss Matilda carefully avoided looking toward him, where he sat wedged between the fragile bamboo what-not and the lacquer tabouret, well knowing that she must cross his smoldering gaze and shunning it.

"And perhaps, by the same token, perhaps you might need me too and not know it," he continued. "I've a notion I might be of some service to the cause, d'y see?"

"Undeniably, Captain," said the pastor, eagerly. "A man so influential—so experienced as yourself—"

"Could help, hey? It's what I think myself. I could. Why even now I'll lay I could tell you matters—things going on right under your nose, so to speak—that you'd hardly dream yourself."

"Among my people?" asked the pastor, wrinkling.

"Aye. Right among your own people—at least some of the wild ones that you want to be most careful of. They're a devilish bold, sly lot for all their pretty ways—these brown islanders—an astonishing bold lot. You'd hardly believe that now, would you—?" His voice dragged fatly. "Would you—Miss Matilda?"

Taken aback, she could not speak, could scarcely parry the attack with a vague murmur. She feared him. She feared that slow, glowering and dangerous man, whose every word came freighted with obscure and sinister meaning. The instinct dimly aroused by her glimpses of him had leapt to vivid conviction. She knew that he was staring across the room; staring avidly at the fresh whiteness of her there, the precise, slim lines of her dress, the curve of her neck, the gleam of her low-parted hair. And it seemed as if he were towering toward her, reaching for her with hot and pudgy hands—

But he had merely risen to take his leave.

"Well, I won't be lingering, Pastor," he said. "Not this time. You stop by my shack to-morrow, and we'll talk further. Maybe I might have some facts that would interest you. What I really came for to-night was to bring a bit of news."

"News?" blinked the pastor.

"You should go below and look to your chapel," chuckled Gregson. "I minded what you said about new lamps being wanted, d'y' see? And so I made bold to hang two fine brass lights in the porch there myself—as a gift-offering."

"For us! For the church—?"

"Aye. It's a small thing. But I've noticed myself lately how those lamps were needed." He paused. "That's a plaguey dark place for lurking and loitering—that chapel porch."

He was gone; the Reverend Spener had returned from escorting him to the step and was still formulating praise and gratitude; but Miss Matilda had not stirred.

"Matilda—! I'm speaking to you. I say—we've been less than just to Captain Gregson, don't you think? Really, a most hearty, true gentleman. Did I tell you he's settled the difficulty with Jeremiah's Loo offhand? Oh, quite. One word from him, and they're asking for a church wedding now. And there are other things I might tell you as well—"

She turned to look full at her father.

"There is one thing I wish you might tell me. What did you bring that man here for?"

The pastor went a pinker shade.

"I didn't bring him. He came of his own motion. He desired most earnestly to come."

"You gave him permission?"

"I did; after he had explained—after he showed me—Matilda.... The short of it is, we've wronged Captain Gregson. You have heard that he used to live with a native girl on Napuka?"

"Everybody has heard it."

"Well," said the pastor, solemnly, "he was married to that girl. I've seen the certificate—quite regular—signed by the Moravian missionary. There were no children, and also—and also my dear, he is now free. He received word by yesterday's schooner of the death of—er—Mrs. Gregson. You see?"

"Ah—!" breathed Miss Matilda, who did indeed begin to see.

He laid a hand on her arm and gave way at last to a paternal quaver. "Matilda, my child—for you are still a child in many things—I have taken anxious thought for you of late. Very anxious thought. You must trust me, my dear. Trust me to do the best for your welfare—and happiness too—as always. Good night!"...

He left her a dry kiss and a fervent blessing and they parted; the pastor to write a particularly hopeful mission report, and this child of his—who was, by the way, twenty-nine years old—to keep a last tryst with a lawless and forbidden love. She knew it must be the last. For the previous one, two nights before, had been held in the porch of the chapel—in that same dark porch so benevolently, so deceitfully endowed by Captain Hull Gregson....

Her own room opened directly on the veranda. She paused only long enough to snatch up a shawl, as she passed through to the far side of the house. Here she could be safe from hostile ears where the mountain torrent ran thundering; safe from prying eyes in the velvet shadows of the passion-vine.

She parted the leaves and harkened. A soft, thin trilling came up to her from the edge of the guava jungle in the ravine, a mere silver thread of melody against the stream's broad clamor. And then as she leaned farther out, so that her face showed for a moment like a pale blossom in the trellis, Motauri came. He came drifting through the moonlight with a wreath of green about his head, a flower chain over his broad, bare shoulders, clad only in a kilted white pareu—the very spirit of youth and strength and joyous, untrammeled freedom, stepped down from the days when Faunus himself walked abroad.

"Hokoolele!" he called gently, and smiled up toward her, the most splendid figure of a man her eyes had ever beheld. "Star" was his name for her, though indeed she was a very wan and shrinking one, and so to lend her courage he sang the crooning native love-song that runs somewhat like this:

"Bosom, here is love for you,
O bosom, cool as night!
How you refresh me as with dew,
Your coolness gives delight!
"Rain is cold upon the hill
And water in the pool;
But, oh, my heart is yearning still
For you, O bosom cool!"

"There is a night thistle blooming up the ravine," he said, "that looks just like the candle-tree you lighted in the church last month. Do you remember, Hokoolele? When I peeped through the window and you were afraid the folk would see me? Ho-ho! Afraid the 'Klistian' folk would see their bad brother outside? But this is much prettier.... Come and see if you can light the thistle."

She kept close to the shadow.

"Are you going to be afraid again?" he asked. "There is no one on the whole mountain to-night. They are all down by the chapel staring at the new lamps and parading themselves along the path. Two great big fireflies by the path! You should see how they shine through the trees."...

He seated himself on the veranda steps and laughed up over the shoulder at her—laughter like a boy's or like a pagan god's.

It was that had tinged and made so live and subtle the fascination he exercised upon her; his unspoiled innocence, his utter, wild simplicity that struck back to the ultimate sources. She could never have felt so toward any of the mission converts, with their woolen shirts and their shoes of ceremony, their hymns and glib, half-comprehended texts; with the fumbling thumb-marks of civilization on their souls. Motauri had never submitted to the first term of the formula. Motauri followed the old first cult of sea and sun, of whispering tree and budding flower. He was the man from the beginning of things, from before Eden; and she who carried in her starved heart the hunger of the first woman—she loved him.

She sank to her knees on the veranda edge above him there and leaned forward with clasped hands to see the soft glow in his deep-lashed eyes, the glint of his even teeth; to catch the sweet breath of jasmine that always clung about him.

"Motauri—" she said, in the liquid tongue that was as easy to her as her own, "I am afraid. Oh, I am—I am afraid!"

"What should you fear? I have promised nothing shall hurt you. The jungle is my friend."

"It is not that. I fear my father, Motauri—and—and that man—Gregson."

She could see his smile fade in the moonlight. "The trader?" he said. "Very many fear him. But he is only a cheat and an oppressor of poor people with things to sell and to buy. What has the trader to do with you?"

"He knows—I am sure he knows about us," she breathed. "He knows. Even now he may be watching—!"

Hurriedly she told him of the day's strange development, of her father's sudden friendship with the powerful white man and Gregson's crafty, malicious hints.

"I do not know what he means to do, but for you and for me this is the end, Motauri," she said, wistfully. "I dare not see you any more—I would not dare. It is not permitted, and I am frightened to think what might happen to you. You must go away quickly." Her timid fingers rested on his close, wavy locks, all crisped and scented with the juice of the wild orange. "It is finished, Motauri," she sighed. "This is the end."

But Motauri's mouth had set, his boyish brows had coiled and firmed, and his glance was bright. He drew closer to her with a lithe movement.

"This is the end?" he echoed. "Then I know how. White star of the night—listen to me now, for I have seen how it must end. Yes—I have known this would come....

"Here in Wailoa you behold me one apart, because I do not seek to do as the white men, or kneel in their temple, or make empty outcry to their gods. Here is not my rightful home. But around the coast two hours' journey, is the little bay of Huapu where dwell some of my people who have never given up their own customs, and there I am truly a high chief, for my fathers used to rule over all the bays. Sweet are the young cocoanuts of Huapu, and the mangoes and the wild plantains of the hillside—sweet and mellow. There in the woods the moss grows deep and soft for a couch, and for shelter are the broad leaves—for hearth the great prostrate tree trunk that holds fire always in its heart. Like mine—white star—like mine!

"Once I would not have ventured, Hokoolele. Once I looked at you from afar, dreaming only of you as one who had dropped from the sky—so different from my kind. But you are my life and the light of my life, and I have touched you and found you real—strange and beautiful, but real—

"Bosom, here is love for you,Published
PublishedO bosom, cool as night!"

He caught her hands in both of his.

"Come with me now, for always. I will take you away to the groves of Huapu. There we will laugh and dance and sing all the day through, and I will bring you water in a fern-leaf and weave you flower chains and climb to pluck you the rarest fruits, and build a nest to keep you safe. There you shall never be sad any more, or wearied, or lonely—or afraid. Because I will be with you always, always—Hokoolele! Come with me to-night!"...

Then the maiden soul of Miss Matilda was torn like a slender, upright palm in the tropic hurricane, for a lover's arm was about her waist and a lover's importunate breath against her cheek, and these things were happening to her for the first time in her life.

"No—no, Motauri!" She struggled inexpertly, fluttering at his touch, bathed in one swift flush. "My father—!" she gasped.

"What does it matter? Your father shall marry us any way he pleases—afterward. But we will live in Huapu forever!"

And with a sudden dizzied weakening she saw that this was true and that she had treasured the knowledge for this very moment. Her father would marry them. He would marry them as he married Jeremiah's Loo and the shell-buyer—"and only too thankful." Curious that the conventional fact should have pleaded with the night's spiced fragrance, with the bland weight of the island zephyr on her eyelids, with the vibrant contact of young flesh and the answering madness in her veins. Curious, too, that her dread and loathing of the man Gregson should have urged her the same way. But so they did, reason fusing with desire like spray with wind, and all conspiring to loose her from the firm hold of habit and training.

"We can go now—this minute," Motauri was whispering. "There are boats to be had below on the beach. We can reach Huapu before morning. None shall see us go."

"You forget the path—the people—" She could hardly frame the words with her lips.

"And Gregson's lights on the chapel—!"

But Motauri laughed low for love and pride.

"I do not use a path. Am I a village-dweller to need steps to my feet? The mountain is path enough for me. That way!... Straight down to the shore."

"By the ravine?" she cried stricken. "Impossible! It has never been done. No one can climb down there. It is death!"

"It is life!" With the word he swept her up like a wisp of a thing in his strong arms. "And also I am not 'no one,' but your captor, Hokoolele. I have caught my star from the sky. See—thus is it done!"...

Such was the elopement of Miss Matilda, when she left her father's house and her father's faith in very much the same manner as her remote maternal ancestor went about the same sort of affair somewhere back in the Stone Age. And in truth Miss Matilda was living the Stone Age for the half hour it took Motauri to get them both down the untracked mountain side. How they managed she never afterward knew. Not that she slept, or fainted, or indulged in any twentieth century tantrum. But it was all too tense to hold.

Of that descent she retained chiefly a memory of the stream and its voices, now low and urgent, now babbling and chuckling in her ear. At times they groped through its luminous mists, again waded from stone to stone in the current or lowered themselves by its brink among the tangled roots. It hurried them, hid them, showed them the way, set the high pulse for their hearts and the pace for their purpose like an exultant accomplice. Nor did Miss Matilda shrink from its ardor.

Once embarked, she had no further fear. Unguessed forces awoke in her. With the hands that had never handled anything rougher than crewelwork she chose her grip along the tough ladder of looped lianas. As confidently as a creature of the wild she sprang across a gulf, or threw herself to the cliff, or slipped to the man's waiting clasp on the next lower ledge. Massed shadows, shifting patches of moonlight, the glimpsed abyss and silvered sea far down—these held no terrors. Sharp danger and quick recovery, sliding moss and rasping rock, the clutch of thorn and creeper—all the rude intricacies of wet earth and teeming jungle seemed things accepted and accessory. She was tinglingly alive, gloriously alert. This was her wonderful night, the great adventure that somehow fulfilled a profound expectancy of her being.

Only at the chute she could not hope to aid. Motauri meant to find a certain slanted fault beyond the last break that offered like a shelf. If they could reach that, they might clamber under the very spout of the hissing outfall, drenched but comparatively safe, for the rest was no more than a scrubby staircase that bore away leftward to the gentler slopes of the valley and the beach below. He told her his plan, then swung her up again and took the whole task to himself, easing inch by inch down the narrow channel. The water boiled and raved about his knees; she could see the streak of its solid flood ahead, where it straightened for a last rush, where the least misstep must dash them down the glistening runaway into space.

But she would not look ahead. She looked at the dim, adorable face so near her own, at the carven lip, the quivering, arched nostril, the fine, proud carriage and dauntless glance of her godling. The flash of their eyes met sidelong. With a deep-drawn sigh of content she surrendered herself to him, drew her arms about his neck until she was pillowed on his smooth shoulder....

"Strange there should be no boats at this end," said Motauri.

They paused by the outskirts of the village and peered toward its clustered, ruddy firelights flickering out upon the shore. There was no one abroad on that empty, nebulous expanse, but they could hear stir and laughter among the huts and the shrill wailing of a child.

"It is still too early," he murmured, and led her back to the cover of a thicket.

Miss Matilda was aware of a slackening from the keen excitement and zested peril of their escape. She had a vague feeling that the boat should have been ready to waft them miraculously over star-lit seas.

"How are you going to get one?" she asked.

"Any of these people would lend me a dugout, but I thought merely to take the first at hand."

"I see none."

"No—they are gone. Perhaps the men are fishing on the reef to-night.... But that would be strange too," he added, perplexed.

Somehow the delay, the uncertainty, began to weigh upon her like an affront. She missed their wild communion, the high, buoying sense of romance and emprise and impossibilities trampled under foot. She missed the single complicity of the stream and its turbulent heartening. Here were voices too, but these were harsh and displeasing, common human voices. An odor of cookery and unclean hearths stole greasily down the air. The fretful child began screaming again and went suddenly silent at a brusque clap. Somebody fell to quarreling in a muttered monotone.

"What are you going to do?" she demanded.

"It will be better if I go search."

"You will not leave me—!"

"Only for a time. I must find someone who has a boat and borrow it. If there are no others, the trader will lend me his."

"Gregson—?"

"He cannot know what I want of it."

"Motauri—" she cried, appalled, "keep away from that man!"

"I have used his boat before," he soothed. "It will be all right. And we must—we must have a boat. Remember where we are."...

She had caught his wrist unwittingly, but now she released it. They stood so for a moment. She was remembering.

"Very well," she said, subdued.

"You will be safe here," he assured her. "Stay close in the brush. Nobody passes this last house. And when I come I will sing a little, very quietly, to let you know. Good-bye, Hokoolele—!"

"Good-bye," she said, with a catch at her throat and a strange foreboding.

Abruptly he had vanished....

How long Miss Matilda crouched in her thicket by the beach of Wailoa she could not have told. It seemed an eternity. The night clouded down, even the stars were veiled. An on-shore breeze whined forlornly across the sands. Her fever had passed. She was damp, bedraggled, bruised and aching, soiled with mud. The wind sought her out, cut through her limp garments.... She waited, shivering.

She was very much alone. She felt helpless beyond anything she had ever experienced, as if the props of life were fallen away. And so they were, for those she had known she had thrust behind and Motauri's magic no longer sustained her. Worse than all was the pressure gathering in her mind, a tide of doubt that she had to deny, like the rising fill in a lock. She dared not let herself think. Still no Motauri.

Benumbed, exhausted, sunk in hebetude, she waited until she could wait no more, until intolerable suspense drove her blindly. She crept through the bush and so came suddenly to the edge of a clearing by a native hut—to see what it was written she should see at that particular moment....

Before the door burned a blink of fire that revealed the dwelling and its tattered alcove of sewn leaves, as if the scene had been set with footlights. It was a very simple little domestic scene. On a fibre mat sprawled a woman. She might have been young, but she was old in the native way, flabby, coarse-grained, with sagging wrinkles, with lusterless hair streaming about her face. A ragged, sleeveless wrapper rendered her precarious service, bulging with flesh. At her side squatted a youngster, an imp of seven it might be, who noisily chewed a stick of sugarcane and spat wide the pith. The woman kept one hand free to admonish him—by his beady eye he required it—and to tend a simmering pot. With the other, tranquilly, she nursed a naked babe.

There was no reticence about that firelight, no possible illusion—and certainly no romance. In grim fidelity it threw up each bald detail, the cheerful dirt and squalor, the easy poverty, the clutter—the plain, animal, every-day facts of a savage home. It touched the bronze skins with splashes of copper, shone in the woman's vacant, bovine stare and gleamed along the generous swell of her breast. And just there it made a wholly candid display of the central figure in this pantomime—the brown babe. Not so brown as he would be some day, indeed quite softly tinted, but unmistakably Polynesian. A most elemental mite of humanity. A most eloquent interpreter of primordial delights. A fat little rascal, with a bobbing fuzzy poll and squirming limbs. And hungry—so very frankly, so very boisterously hungry—!

Miss Matilda went away from that place.

She had a confused idea of flight, but her feet were rebellious, and before she had taken twenty steps she was lost. Without direction, groping in the darkness, even then by some intuition she kept to the trees and the undergrowth for hiding. That was her only effective impulse—to hide. She could not go on. Under heaven there was no going back. People were awake all about her in the huts. More people would be strolling and skylarking along the chapel path, supposing she could have found it. She had the sole, miserable craving that the earth might open to receive her.

And thus it was chance alone that guided her course through the fringe of the village, through garden and sand strip, and that brought her finally, all unseen, to the wall of a large house, to a post, to a slatted gallery aglow inside with lamps, and to her second discovery....

"Curse your black soul!" a voice was saying, with heavy, slow brutality, "when I tell you to drink—you drink! D'y' hear?"

"No can do, Mahrster," came the faltering response, in the broken bÊche de mer that is the token of the white man's domination in the islands. "That fella rum taboo 'long me altogether."

"What do I care for your taboo? Drink!"

Fell an interval of silence.

"Drink again—drink hearty!"

Captain Hull Gregson sat leaning forward by the side of his living-room table, shoving down the length of it a glass that brimmed and sparkled redly. On his knee, in a fist like a ham, he balanced a black bottle. His jutted jaw took a line with the outthrust arm, with the lowering brow, as if the whole implacable force and will of the man were so projected.

And at the end, facing him, stood Motauri—a different, a sadly different Motauri. A Motauri not in the least the joyous woodland faun in his attitude now. His proud crest was lowered, stripped of its wreath; his magnificent muscles drooped. He stood humbly, with chest collapsed, on shuffling feet, as became an inferior. He drew the back of his hand across his lips and eyed the white man furtively....

"That's better," grunted Gregson, and leaned back to set the bottle on the table amid a litter of odds and ends, books, papers, a revolver, a tarred tiller-rope with a roseknot. "Perhaps that'll loosen your tongue. First time I ever seen your breed hold off the stuff. But then, you're one of these independent lads, ain't you? Old chief stock, you call yourself. Plenty wild Kanaka, you.... Plenty bold, bad fella you—hey?"

"No, Mahrster," said Motauri, deprecating.

Gregson regarded him with a hard smile.

"And now you're going to tell me why you tried to sneak a boat at this hour o' night."

"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.

"You've said that a dozen times, and it's no better. It don't pass. Go fish? Go soak your black head! What are you up to, hey? Come now—tell."

Motauri made no answer, and the other controlled himself. Behind his dark mask the big trader was under the empire of some powerful emotion. His hands clenched and opened again, trembling a little. His face shone like wet leather. But it was in a tone oddly detached, musing, that he went on.

"You're smart. I don't say a Kanaka can't be smart when he wants to hide anything. He can. I ain't figgered you yet. And that's a mighty healthy thing for you, my boy, d'y' see? Because, if I could once make sure it was you I saw slipping away by the chapel hedge two nights ago, I'd—" A purplish haze suffused his cheek. "I'd dig the heart out of your carcass with my two hands," he ended, very quietly, and hit the table so that it jumped. "Was it?" he roared.

"No-o, Mahrster," said Motauri.

"You lie—blast you—it was!"

"No, Mahrster."

"Was it you that's been hanging around that white fella girl b'long missionary—that's dared lift your dog's eyes to her?"

He crouched like a beast, ferine—all the obscure and diabolic passion of him ready to spring.

"No, Mahrster."

Gregson glared at him steadily.

"What did you want of that boat?"

"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.

The trader sat back again, plying his billowy silk handkerchief.

"The trouble with me—" he said, reflectively, "I can't believe my own eyes; that's the trouble with me. And how could I believe 'em?" he inquired, with almost a plaintive note. "Such things don't happen. They can't. Why—what kind of a man are you? Black, I believe—leastways brown. And she—she—

"A Kanaka. If not you, then another. A Kanaka! To know her, be near her—touch her—play all manner of pretty, cuddlin' tricks around her—to—to kiss her, maybe! To crush her up in his arms—!" The words came away from him hot and slow, from under half-shut eyes. "And I've sat here behind them slats and watched her go by and wished I might crawl where her little feet could walk on me....

"How should one of your sort have the cursed impudence to think of such things? What have you got to do with heaven? Could you see anything in that blind-like look sideways—and hair so smooth over the ear? Do you know what level eyebrows and a fullish underlip mean—hey? Do you? A lip like a drop of blood—

"What did you want that boat for?" he cried, in a terrible voice.

"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.

"I tell you one thing, you don't leave here till I'm sure. There's something rotten going on. I smell it. I'm on the track, and I'll never give up—never give up. Right now I've got the mission path watched by my own men. Nobody gets up or down without my knowing it—to-night or ever. D'y' mind that, before I screw the thumbs off you to make you talk?"

It was then that he heard the slight, sobbing breath in his gallery, the rattle of his slatted door that brought him to his feet and bounding across the room. Reaching into the darkness he dragged out the eaves-dropper—whose poor knees had simply given like paper, whose desperate effort to save herself had thrown her against the jamb and betrayed her—Miss Matilda....

"You—!" said Gregson. "You—!"

He dropped her by the threshold and started away from her with spread fingers and fallen jaw. For a time only the sound of his labored breathing filled the silence and the three stayed so, the woman collapsed against a chair, Motauri swaying and winking stupidly and Gregson, struck dumb, incredulous, empurpled at first and then slowly paling. Without a word he spun on his heel, returned to the table and poured himself a drink and tossed it off.

"Respectability!" he said, in the tone of conversation, caught his collar and ripped it loose. "By Heaven!" he cried, and wrung his great hands. "What am I going to do now? What am I going to do?"

His wandering glance lighted on the rope's end on the table-top, and he coiled it in his hand. He began to walk to and fro before them. His face was ghastly, his bloodshot blue eyes were set like jewels. Now he stopped before Motauri and looked him up and down curiously. Laughter took him like a hiccup: laughter not good to hear: but he left off as quickly. He came back and stood over the cowering figure on the floor.

"And you're the thing that was too good for me!"

He let his gaze possess her deliberately, noting each stain and smirch, her disordered dress and loosened hair, and pitiful, staring face.

"Well, you're not too good now," he said, wetting his lips. "No—you're none too good! You'll marry me to-morrow—and you'll crawl on your knees to have me. And that father of yours—that sniveling old hypocrite—he'll crawl to make the lines, if I choose....

"When I think how I've dreamed of you! How I've lived through days and nights of perdition, wanting you—you sweet, cold, white saint you—and a devil after all!

"To think how I've schemed and trembled and trembled and waited, afraid to say a word or make a move lest I'd queer any chance. Me—a common trader with a native wife that wouldn't die. And you up there on the hill so prim and fine. A missionary's daughter. Too respectable to touch! And what are you now—that's been out in the night—?"

He whirled around and the maddened, jealous rage and hate rose up in his soul like scum on a dark pool.

"With a nigger!" he screamed.

All his strength was behind the tiller-rope. It slashed Motauri over the face so that the red welt seemed to spurt. As he lifted his arm to repeat, with a strangled cry Motauri leapt upon him and the rest was fury. They fought baresark, interlocked and silent, spinning from side to side of the room. Gregson had the weight and the thews and the cunning. He kept the other's clutch away from his throat and maneuvred toward the table. As they reeled against it, he put forth a mighty effort, tore off Motauri and hurled him away for an instant—long enough to grab the revolver.

"Nigger—I said!"

But in the very gasp he choked. The weapon raised for a chopping, pointblank shot, dropped over his shoulder. He rocked, pressing at his heart, frowned heavily once, and fell crashing forward....

"Hokoolele! Hokoolele—! Up and make haste!"

Miss Matilda lifted her face from her hands.

"Let us hurry while there is time," urged Motauri, thickly. "No one has seen or heard us yet. His boat-shed is open. We are safe!"

"Go away from me!" said Miss Matilda.

"What do you say?" he stammered. "Come. Nobody will stop us. Nobody will know anything, about us—"

She fended him off with a gesture of instinctive loathing....

"Please go—"

"But you cannot stay here! It would be a very evil thing for you if you were found in this house. It must never be known you were here at all."

"Don't touch me!" That seemed the only important thing.

"Hokoolele—what of the golden chain of love between us? Come with me now!"

"I was mad. I was blind. It is judgment!"

He regarded her sorrowfully, but sternly too.

"You mean you do not want me any more?"

"No—!" she moaned, in the stupor of horror and despair. And then the brown man, the native, whose blood had been roused by every agency that can stir wild blood to frenzy—by love and shame, by drink, by battle and triumph—then Motauri, the high chief, struck unerringly to the heart of the matter and made his swift decision by his own primitive lights. Recovering her shawl he wrapped it about her tightly, caught her up once more willy-nilly in his arms and bore her away from that sinister place by force....

She was lying on a bench in the veranda of her father's house and her father himself was calling her name, when she came to herself.

"Matilda, I'm speaking to you! Where are you?"

He came through the window of her room.

"Gracious me!—have you been sleeping out there?"

She could only stare at him and down at the twisted shawl about her, for it seemed it must be so, she had only been sleeping—with what dreams!

But his next words showed her the truth.

"Matilda, my dear," he quavered, "you must prepare yourself. Be brave. Something dreadful has happened. One of Captain Gregson's boys has just come up from the village with terrible news. The Captain is dead! He had some kind of a stroke, it seems—very sudden—all alone at the time. I shall have to hurry right down. And at this hour too, when the woods are so damp! What a loss, what a loss, Matilda, when I had so hoped—!"

He left her, and it came to her then that she too had hoped and that she too had lost. The mountain stream was singing in her ears, and it seemed threaded with mockery. The moonlight came filtering through the vine, and it was old and cold. Her wonderful night was over. She was safe. Her life would begin again where she had dropped it, in formulated routine, and nobody would ever know—unless Motauri—

Some curious twinge, half fearful, half regretful, drove her to peer through the leaves and to listen for his crooning song.

"Bosom, here is love for you,
O bosom, cool as night!"

But it did not come. She was to listen for it many times, and it was never to come. Having reached such heights and depths that night, having achieved the impossible and the doubly impossible, going down the stream and climbing it again, Motauri had gone down once more and at last by way of the chute and the outfall. For Motauri was a gentleman of sorts. But perhaps, because he was also a pagan, he had been at some pains before that final descent to enmesh his wrists firmly and helplessly in a knotted tendril from the passion-vine.