he stood up and uttered them.
He smiled. The instant she heard the news she had made up her mind to
go. It was not very flattering to man, but what could any man count in
her eyes when a schooner waiting to be bought in Sydney was in the wind?
What a creature! What a creature!

* * * * *

Berande was a lonely place to Sheldon in the days that followed. In the
morning after Joan's departure, he had seen Tudor's expedition off on its
way up the Balesuna; in the late afternoon, through his telescope, he had
seen the smoke of the _Upolu_ that was bearing Joan away to Sydney; and
in the evening he sat down to dinner in solitary state, devoting more of
his time to looking at her empty chair than to his food. He never came
out on the veranda without glancing first of all at her grass house in
the corner of the compound; and one evening, idly knocking the balls
about on the billiard table, he came to himself to find himself standing
staring at the nail upon which from the first she had hung her Stetson
hat and her revolver-belt.

Why should he care for her? he demanded of himself angrily. She was
certainly the last woman in the world he would have thought of choosing
for himself. Never had he encountered one who had so thoroughly
irritated him, rasped his feelings, smashed his conventions, and violated
nearly every attribute of what had been his ideal of woman. Had he been
too long away from the world? Had he forgotten what the race of women
was like? Was it merely a case of propinquity? And she wasn't really a
woman. She was a masquerader. Under all her seeming of woman, she was a
boy, playing a boy's pranks, diving for fish amongst sharks, sporting a
revolver, longing for adventure, and, what was more, going out in search
of it in her whale-boat, along with her savage islanders and her bag of
sovereigns. But he loved her--that was the point of it all, and he did
not try to evade it. He was not sorry that it was so. He loved her--that
was the overwhelming, astounding fact.

Once again he discovered a big enthusiasm for Berande. All the bubble-
illusions concerning the life of the tropical planter had been pricked by
the stern facts of the Solomons. Following the death of Hughie, he had
resolved to muddle along somehow with the plantation; but this resolve
had not been based upon desire. Instead, it was based upon the inherent
stubbornness of his nature and his dislike to give over an attempted
task.

B