through
the bush and so came suddenly to the edge of a clearing by a native
hut--to see what it was written she should see at that particular
moment....

Before the door burned a blink of fire that revealed the dwelling and
its tattered alcove of sewn leaves, as if the scene had been set with
footlights. It was a very simple little domestic scene. On a fibre mat
sprawled a woman. She might have been young, but she was old in the
native way, flabby, coarse-grained, with sagging wrinkles, with
lusterless hair streaming about her face. A ragged, sleeveless wrapper
rendered her precarious service, bulging with flesh. At her side
squatted a youngster, an imp of seven it might be, who noisily chewed a
stick of sugarcane and spat wide the pith. The woman kept one hand free
to admonish him--by his beady eye he required it--and to tend a
simmering pot. With the other, tranquilly, she nursed a naked babe.

There was no reticence about that firelight, no possible illusion--and
certainly no romance. In grim fidelity it threw up each bald detail, the
cheerful dirt and squalor, the easy poverty, the clutter--the plain,
animal, every-day facts of a savage home. It touched the bronze skins
with splashes of copper, shone in the woman's vacant, bovine stare and
gleamed along the generous swell of her breast. And just there it made a
wholly candid display of the central figure in this pantomime--the brown
babe. Not so brown as he would be some day, indeed quite softly tinted,
but unmistakably Polynesian. A most elemental mite of humanity. A most
eloquent interpreter of primordial delights. A fat little rascal, with a
bobbing fuzzy poll and squirming limbs. And hungry--so very frankly, so
very boisterously hungry--!

* * * * *

Miss Matilda went away from that place.

She had a confused idea of flight, but her feet were rebellious, and
before she had taken twenty steps she was lost. Without direction,
groping in the darkness, even then by some intuition she kept to the
trees and the undergrowth for hiding. That was her only effective
impulse--to hide. She could not go on. Under heaven there was no going
back. People were awake all about her in the huts. More people would be
strolling and skylarking along the chapel path, supposing she could have
found it. She had the sole, miserable craving that the earth might open
to receive her.

And thus it was chance alone that guided her course through the fringe