t extra for good luck. He was sixty inches of nerves, wrinkles, and
whiskers, with special adornments in the shape of a blue smoking cap,
and a pair of spectacles with specially ground lenses of an enormous
thickness.

Newmarch grunted something which the Professor and I took to be an
introduction, and he put a skinny hand into mine.

"You have been a long while in the Islands?" he squeaked.

"Longer than I care to say," I replied.

"Have you been around the spot we are making for?" he asked.

"I was on Penrhyn Island for three months," I answered. "I was helping a
German scientist who was studying the family habits of turtles."

I made a foolish break by admitting that I possessed any knowledge of
Polynesia. The Professor had left his home at sunny Sausalito, on the
shores of San Francisco Bay, in search of that kind of stuff, and before
I could do a conversational backstep he had pushed me against the side
of the galley and was deluging me with questions, the answers to which
he entered in shorthand in a notebook that was bulkier than a Dutchman's
Bible. The old spectacled ancient could fire more queries in three
minutes than any human gatling that ever gripped a brief, and I looked
around for relief.

And the wonder is that the relief came. I forgot the Professor and his
anxiety concerning the "temba-temba" devil dance when my eyes happened
to catch sight of the vision that was approaching from the companionway.
A boat carrying a science expedition to one of the loneliest groups in
the Pacific was not the place where one would expect to find the
handsomest girl in all the world, and my tongue refused to mould my
words. The girl was tall, of graceful build, and possessed of a quiet
beauty that had a most peculiar effect upon me. Only that afternoon, as
I lay in the shadow of the pile of pearl shell on Levuka wharf, I had
thought of crossing to Auckland and shipping up to 'Frisco so that I
could hear good women laugh and talk as I had heard them in my dreams
during the years I had spent around the Islands, and now the woman of my
dreams was in front of me. But I was afraid of her. When she came toward
me I thought of the years I had wasted down in that lonely quarter where
ambition is strangled by lassitude bred in tropical sunshine, and the
ghost of the man I might have been banged me fair between the two eyes.

"My daughter, Miss Edith Herndon," squeaked the Professor, and when I
put out my big hand to take h