"Is she your girl?" I asked Ormsby.

He colored slightly.

"I suppose so, and the baby will be mine if it's ever born. At any
rate, I'm going to stick to her while she's in this fix. I'll tell you
on the square, I'm not gone on her; but she had a lover, an Australian
I knew, and he was good to her, but he got the consumption and couldn't
work. Maybe he came here with it. They hadn't a shilling, and Tahia
built a hut in the hills up there near where the nature men live,
and put him in it, and she fed and cared for him. She went to the
mountains for feis she came down here to the reef to fish, and she
found eggs and breadfruit in other people's gardens. She kept him
alive, the Lord knows how, until he could secure money from Sydney
to go home and die. Now, she's got the con from him, I suppose, and
it would be a shabby trick to leave her when she's dying and will be
a mother in two months, according to Doctor Cassiou!"

He made a wry face and lit his pipe. The girl could not understand
a word and sat immovable.

"She's Marquesan," he went on. "Her mother has written through a
trader in Atuona, on Hiva-Oa, to send her to her own valley, but she's
quit. She sits and broods all day. I 'd like to go back to my own home
in Warwickshire. I know I'm changing for the bad here. I live like a
dam' beach-comber. I only get a screw of three hundred francs a month,
and that all goes for us two, with medicines and doctors. She'd go
to Atuona if I'd go; but I can't make a living there, and I'm rotten
enough now without living off her people in the cannibal group. She's
skin and bones and coughs all night."

Ormsby puffed his pipe as Tahia put her hand in his. Her action
was that of a small dog who puts his paw on his master's sleeve,
hesitating, hopeful, but uncertain. She regarded me with slightly
veiled hostility. I was a white who might be taking him away to
foreign things.

"She's heard us talking about Atuona and Hiva-Oa, and she thinks
maybe I 've concluded to go. I can't do it, O'Brien. If I go there,
I'll go native forever. I've got a streak of some dam' savage in
me. Listen! I've got to go on the Etoile to Kaukura tojmorrow. Now,
the natives are always kind to any one, but sickness they are not
interested in. You go and see her, won't you? She's about all in,
and it won't hurt you."

Ormsby went to the Dangerous Isles on the Etoile, and did not return
for three weeks. He did not find Tahia in her shack on the hill. Sh