nd her
father himself was calling her name, when she came to herself.

"Matilda, I'm speaking to you! Where are you?"

He came through the window of her room.

"Gracious me!--have you been sleeping out there?"

She could only stare at him and down at the twisted shawl about her, for
it seemed it must be so, she had only been sleeping--with what dreams!

But his next words showed her the truth.

"Matilda, my dear," he quavered, "you must prepare yourself. Be brave.
Something dreadful has happened. One of Captain Gregson's boys has just
come up from the village with terrible news. The Captain is dead! He had
some kind of a stroke, it seems--very sudden--all alone at the time. I
shall have to hurry right down. And at this hour too, when the woods are
so damp! What a loss, what a loss, Matilda, when I had so hoped--!"

He left her, and it came to her then that she too had hoped and that she
too had lost. The mountain stream was singing in her ears, and it seemed
threaded with mockery. The moonlight came filtering through the vine,
and it was old and cold. Her wonderful night was over. She was safe. Her
life would begin again where she had dropped it, in formulated routine,
and nobody would ever know--unless Motauri--

Some curious twinge, half fearful, half regretful, drove her to peer
through the leaves and to listen for his crooning song.

_"Bosom, here is love for you,
O bosom, cool as night!"_

But it did not come. She was to listen for it many times, and it was
never to come. Having reached such heights and depths that night, having
achieved the impossible and the doubly impossible, going down the stream
and climbing it again, Motauri had gone down once more and at last by
way of the chute and the outfall. For Motauri was a gentleman of sorts.
But perhaps, because he was also a pagan, he had been at some pains
before that final descent to enmesh his wrists firmly and helplessly in
a knotted tendril from the passion-vine.

THE PRICE OF THE HEAD

The possessions of Christopher Alexander Pellett were these: his name,
which he was always careful to retain intact; a suit of ducks, no longer
intact, in which he lived and slept; a continuous thirst for liquor, and
a set of red whiskers. Also he had a friend. Now, no man can gain
friendship, even among the gentle islands of Polynesia, except by virtue
of some quality attaching to him. Strength, humor, villainy: he must
show some trait by which the f