tion!" sighed Sister Serapoline. "That would solve all difficulties, and save her soul and happiness."

Vainly the nuns and priests had tried during the dozen years of her tutelage in their hands to direct her aspirations toward this goal, but one had only to look into her burning eyes or see the supple movement of her body to know that she sought her joy on earth.

Liha-Liha, the natives called her father, which means corporal, and that they had hated and yet feared him when Hiva-oa was still given over to cannibalism, outlined his character. He had lived and died in his house near the Stinking Springs on the road to Taaoa. The sole white man in that valley, he had lorded it over the natives more sternly than had their old chiefs. He had fought down the wilderness, planted great cocoanut-plantations, forced the unwilling islanders to work for him, and dollar by dollar, with an iron will, he had wrung from their labor the fortune now left in the dainty hands of his halfsavage daughter.

Song of the Nightingale, the convict cook of the governor, gave me light on the man.

"I loved his woman, Piiheana [Climber of Trees Who Was Killed and Eaten], who was the mother of Mademoiselle Nsaid Song of the Nightingale. "One night he found me with her on his paepae. He shot me; then he had me condemned as a robber, and I spent five years in the prison at Tai-o-hae."

"And Piiheana?"

"He beat her till her bones were broken, and sent her from him. Then

he took Daughter of a Piece of Tattooing, to whom he left in his will thirtyfive thousand francs. It was she who brought up Mademoiselle."

Mademoiselle herself walked daintily down to the road, where her horse was tied, and I was presented to her. She gave me her hand with the air of a princess, her scarlet lips quivering into a faint smile and her smoldering, unsatisfied eyes sweeping my face. With a conciliating, yet imperious, air, she suggested that I ride over the hills with her.

Picking up her lace skirt and frilled

petticoat, she vaulted into the man's saddle without more ado, and took the heavy reins in her small gloved hands. Her horse was scrubby, but she rode well, as do all Marquesans, her supple body following his least movement, and her slim, silk-stockinged legs clinging as though she were riding bareback. When the swollen river threatened to wet her varnished slippers, she perched herself on the saddle, feet and all, and made a dry ford.

Over the hills she led the way at a gallop, despite wretched trail and tripping bushes. Down we went through the jungle, walled in by a hundred kinds of trees and ferns and vines. Now and then we came into a cleared space, a native plantation, a hut surrounded by breadfruit-, mango- and cocoanut-, orange- and lime-trees. No one called "Kaoho!" and Mademoiselle N- - did not slacken her pace. We swept into the jungle again without a word, my horse following her mount's flying feet, and I ducking and dodging branches and noose-like vines.

In a marshy place, where patches of taro spread their magnificent leaves over the earth, we slowed to a walk. The jungle tangle was all about us; a thousand bright flowers, scarlet, yellow, purple, crimson, splashed with color, the masses of green; tall ferns uncurled their fronds; giant creepers coiled like snakes through the boughs; and the sluggish air was heavy with innumerable delicious scents. I said to Mlle. N that the beauty of the islands was like that of a fantastic dream, an Arabian Night's tale.

"Yes?" she said, in a note of weariness and irony. The feet of the horses made a sucking sound on the oozy ground. "I am half white," she said after a moment, and as the horses' hoofs struck the rocky trail again, she whipped up her mount, and we galloped up the slope.

After a time the trail widened into a road, and I saw before us a queer inclosure. At first sight I thought it a wild-animal park. There were small houses like cages and a big, box-like structure in the center, all inclosed in a wire fence, a couple of acres in all. Drawing nearer, I saw that the houses

were cabins painted in gaudy colors, and that the white box was a marble tomb of great size. Each slab of marble was rimmed with scarlet cement, and the top of the tomb, under a corrugated iron roof, was covered with those abominable bead-wreaths from Paris.

Like the humbler Marquesans, who have their coffins made and graves dug before their passing, Mademoiselle N's father had seen to it that this last resting-place was prepared while he lived, and he had placed it here in the center of his plantation, before the house that had been his home for thirty years. With something of his own crude strength and barbaric taste, it stood there, the grim reminder of her white father to the girl in whose veins his own blood mingled with that of the savage.

She looked at it without emotion, and after I had surveyed it, we dismounted, and she led me into her house. It was a neat and showily furnished cottage, whose Nottingham-lace curtains, varnished golden-oak chairs, and ingrain carpet spoke of attempts at mail-order beautification. Sitting on a horse-hair sofa, hard and slippery, I drank wine and ate mangos, while opposite me Mlle. N's mother sat in stiff misery on a chair. She was a withered Marquesan woman, barefooted and ugly, dressed in a red cotton garment of the hideous night-gown pattern introduced by the missionaries, and her eyes were tragedies of bewilderment and suffering, while her toothless mouth essayed a smile and she struggled with a few words of bad French.

Though Mlle. N was most hospitable, she was not at ease, and I knew it was because of the appearance of her mother, this woman whom her father had discarded years before, but to whom the daughter had shown kindness since his death. The mother appeared more at ease with her successor, a somewhat younger Marquesan woman, who waited on us as a servant, and seemed contented enough. Doubtless the two who had endured the moods of Liha-Liha had many confidences now that he was gone.

I had to describe America to Mlle. Nand the inventions and social

customs of which she had read. She would not want to live in such a big country, she said, but Tahiti seemed to combine comfort with the atmosphere of her birthplace. Perhaps she might go to Tahiti to live.

As I took my hat to leave, she said: "I have been told that they are separating the lepers in Tahiti and confining them outside Papeete in a kind of prison. Is that so?"

"Not a prison," I replied. "The Government has built cottages for them in a little valley. Don't you think it wise to segregate them?"

She did not reply, and shortly after I rode away.

A week later I met her one evening at Otupoto, that dividing-place between the valleys of Taaoa and Atuona, where Kahuiti and his fellow-warriors had trapped the human meat. I had walked there to sit on the edge of the precipice and watch the sun set in the sea. She came on horseback from her home toward the village to spend Sunday with the nuns. She got off her horse when she saw me, and lit a cigarette.

"What do you do here all alone?" she asked in French. She never used a word of Marquesan to me. I replied that I was trying to imagine myself there fifty years earlier, when the meddlesome white sang very low in the concert of the island powers.

"The people were happier then, I suppose," she said meditatively, as she handed me her burning cigarette in the courteous way of her mother's people, "but it does not attract me. I would like to see the world I read of."

She sat beside me on the rock, her delicately modeled chin on her pink palm, and gazed at the colors fading from vivid gold and rose to yellow and mauve on the sky and the sea. The quietness of the scene, the gathering twilight, perhaps, too, something in the fact that I was a white man and a stranger, broke down her reserve.

"But with whom can I see that world?" she said with sudden passion. "Money-I have it. I don't want it. I want to be loved. I want a man. What shall I do? I cannot marry a native, for they do not think as I do. dread to marry a Frenchman.

I-I

You

know le droit du mari? A French wife has no freedom."

I cited Mme. Bapp, who chastised her spouse.

"He is no man, that criquet!" she said scornfully. "I would be better off not to marry, if I had a real man who loved me, and who would take me across the sea. What am I saying? The nuns would be shocked. I do not know-oh,

I do not know what it is that tears at me! But I want to see the world, and I want a man to love me."

"Your islands here are more beautiful than any of the developed countries," I said. "There are many thieves there, too, to take your money."

"I have read that," she answered, "and I am not afraid. I am afraid of nothing. I want to know a different life than here. I will at least go to Tahiti. I am tired of the convent. The nuns talk always of religion, and I am young, and I am half French. We die young, most of us, and I have had no pleasure."

I saw her black eyes, as she puffed her cigarette, shining with her vision. Some man would put tears in them soon, I thought, if she chose that path.

Would she be happy in Tahiti? If she could find one of her own kind, a half-caste, a paragon of kindness and fidelity, she might be. With the white she would know only torture.

The last colors of the sunset faded slowly on the sea, and the world was a soft gray filled with the radiance of the rising moon. I rose, and when Mlle. N- had mounted, I strolled ahead of her horse in the moonlight. I was wearing a tuberose over my ear, and she remarked it.

"You know what that signifies? If a man seeks a woman, he wears a white flower over his ear, and if his love grows ardent, he wears a red rose or hibiscus. But if he tires, he puts some green thing in their place. Bon dieu! That is the depth of ignominy for the woman scorned. I remember one girl who was made light of that way in church. She stayed a day hidden in the hills weeping, and then she threw herself from a cliff."

There was in her manner a melancholy and a longing.

"Tahitians wear flowers all the day," I said. "They are gay, and life is pleasant upon their island. There are automobiles by the score, cinemas, singing, and dancing every evening, and many Europeans and Americans. With money you could have everything."

"It is not singing and dancing I desire," she exclaimed. "Pas du tout! I must know more people, and not people like priests and these copra-dealers. I have read in novels of men who are like gods, who are bold and strong, but who make their women happy."

Her Marquesan blood was speaking in that cry of the heart, unrestrained and passionate. They are not the cold, chaste women of other climes, these women of the Marquesas; with blood at fever-heat and hearts beating like wild things against bars, they listen when love or its counterfeit pours into their ears those soft words with nothing in them that make a song. They have no barriers of reserve or haughtiness; they make no bargains; they go where the heart goes, careless of certified vows.

"Mon dieu!" Mlle. N- exclaimed and put her tiny hand to her red lips. "What if the good sisters heard me? I am bad. I know. Eh bien! I am Marquesan, after all.”

We were about to cross the stream by my cabin, and I mounted the horse behind her to save a wetting. She turned impulsively and looked at me, her lovely face close to mine, her dark eyes burning, and her hot breath on my cheek.

"Write to me when you are in Tahiti, and tell me if you think I would be happy there," she said imploringly. "I have no friends here except the nuns. I need to go away. I am dying here." Coming up my trail a few days later, I found on my paepae a shabbily dressed little bag of bones of a white man, with a dirty gray beard and a harsh voice like that of Baufré. He had a note to me from Le Brunnec, introducing M. Lemoal, born in Brest, a naturalized American. The note was sealed, and I put it carefully away before turning to my visitor. It read:

fun. This fellow has had a tremendous life. He is an old sailor, pirate, gold-miner, Chinese-hanger, thief, robber, honest-man, baker, trader; in a word, an interesting type. With the aid of several glasses of wine I have put him in the mood to talk delightfully.

A low-browed man was Lemoal, sapped and ruthless, but certainly he had adventured.

Was the Bella Union Theater still there in Frisco? Did they still fight in Bottle Meyers, and was his friend Tasset on the police force yet? His memories of San Francisco antedated mine. He had been a hoodlum there, and had helped to hang Chinese. He had gone to Tahiti in 1870 and made a hundred thousand francs keeping a bakery. That fortune had lasted him during two years' tour of the world.

"Now I'm bust," he said bitterly. "Now I got no woman, no children, no friends, and I don't want none. I am by myself and damn everybody!"

I soothed his misanthropy with two fingers of rum, and he mellowed into advice.

"I saw you with that daughter of Liha-Liha," he said, using the native name of the dead millionaire. "You be careful. One time I baked bread in Taaoa. My oven was near his planta

tion. I saw that girl come into the woods and take off her dress. She had a mirror to see her back, and I looked, and the sun shone bright. What she saw, I saw a patch of white. She is a leper, that rich girl."

His eyes were full of hate. "You don't like her," I said to him. "Why?"

"Be

"Why? Why?" he screamed. cause her father was an accursed villian. He was always kissing the dirty hands of the priests. He used to give his workmen opium to make them work faster, and then he would go to church. He made his money, yes. He was damn' hypocrite. And now his daughter, with all that rotten money, is a leper. I tell everybody what I saw. Everybody here knows it but you. Everybody will know it in Tahiti if she goes there."

The man was like a snake to me. I threw away the glass he had drunk from. And yet, was it idle curiosity, or was it fear of being shut away in the valley outside Papeete by the quarantine officers, that made her ask me that question about the lepers?

Liha-Liha had spent thirty years making money. He had coined the sweat and blood and lives of a thousand Marquesans into a golden fortune, and he had left behind him that fortune, a marble tomb, and Mlle. N▬▬▬.