ent
you disappeared within the door of your own house,--if they loved one
man better than another,--if they could always marry the one they
liked best. She wondered why every one must be married,--why could
she not go on and live just as she had,--she could weave and sew?

A gray lizard darted from out its hiding-place in the attap at a
great atlas moth which worked its brilliant wings; clumsily it tore
their delicate network until the air was full of a golden dust.

"I am the moth," she said softly, and raised her hand too late to
save it from its enemy.

The Sultan's own yacht, the Pante, brought the Prince back to Maur,
and as it was low tide, the Governor's launch went out beyond the
bar and met him.

The band played the national anthem when he landed on the pier,
and Inchi Mohammed, the Tuan Hakim, or Chief Justice, made a speech.

The red gravel walk from the landing to the palace gate was strewn
with hibiscus and alamander and yellow convolvulus flowers, and
bordered with the delicate maidenhair fern.

Johore and British flags hung in great festoons from the deep
verandas of the palace, and the brass guns from the fort gave forth
the royal salute.

Anak was in the crowd with her father, the old chief, and her
affianced, Noa. She had put on her silk sarong and kabaya, and some
curious gold brooches that were her mother's. In her coal-black hair
she had stuck some sprays of the sweet-smelling chumpaka flower. On her
slender bare feet were sandals cunningly wrought in colored beads. Her
soft brown eyes glowed with excitement, and she edged away from the
punghulo's side until she stood close up in front, so near that she
could almost touch the sarong of the Tuan Hakim as he read.

The Prince had grown so since he left that she scarcely knew him,
and save for the narrow silk sarong about his waist, he was dressed
in the English clothes of a Lieutenant of his Highness's artillery. In
the front of his rimless cap shone the arms of Johore set in diamonds,
exactly as his father, the Governor, wore them. He paused and smiled
as he thanked the cringing Tuan Hakim.

The blood rushed to the girl's cheeks, and she nearly fell down at
his feet. She realized but dimly that Noa was plucking at her kabaya,
wishing her to go with him to see the bungalow that his father was
building for them.

"The posts are to be of polished nebong" he was saying, "the wood-work
of maranti wood from Pahang; and there is to be a cote, e