unselfishness by her self-seeking. With a wise contempt of trifles,
he had kept peace over little things, and the island had long amused
itself about his pliant disposition, but now that for the first time
he proved unyielding, the island said he was wrong. To adopt a child
against the wish of his wife, to take into his family the waif of a
drunken woman and an idle foreigner, was an act of stubborn injustice
and folly. But Adam held to his purpose, and Michael Sunlocks
remained at Government House.

A year passed, and Sunlocks was transformed. No one would have
recognized him. The day his father brought him he had been pale under
the dust that covered him; he had been timid and had trembled, and
his eyes had looked startled, as though he had already been beaten
and cuffed and scolded. A child, like a flower, takes the color of
the air it breathes, and Sunlocks had not been too young to feel the
grimy cold of the atmosphere in which he had been born. But now he
had opened like a rose to the sun, and his cheeks were ruddy and his
eyes were bright. He had become plump and round and sturdy, and his
hair had curled around his head and grown yet warmer of hue, like the
plumes of a bird in the love season. And, like a bird, he chirruped
the long day through, skipping and tripping and laughing and singing
all over the house, idolized by some, beloved by many, caressed by
all, even winning upon Mrs. Fairbrother herself, who, whatever her
objection to his presence, had not yet steeled herself against his
sweetness.

Another year passed, and the children grew together--Sunlocks and
Greeba, boy and girl, brother and sister--in the innocent communion
of healthy childhood, with their little whims, their little ways,
their little tiffs, and with the little sorrows that overcast
existence. And Sunlocks picked up his English words as fast as he
picked shells on the beach, gathering them on his tongue as he
gathered the shells into his pinafore, dropping them and picking them
up again.

Yet another year went by, and then over the luminous innocence of the
children there crept the strange trail of sex, revealing already
their little differences of character, and showing what they were to
be in days to come--the little maid, quick, urgent, impulsive and
vain; the little man, quiet, unselfish and patient, but liable to
outbursts of temper.

A fourth year passed, and then the little people were parted. The
Duchess came from London, wh