ething. The little
tattooed hand released its clasp of his arm and struck him a playful
blow.

"And would that bind thee more to me, and to the ways of these our
people of Vahitahi," she asked, with still buried face.

"Aye," answered the ex-captain slowly, "for I have none but thee in the
world to care for."

She turned her face up. "Is there none--not even one woman in far-off
Beretania, whose face comes to thee in the darkness."

Brantley shook his head sadly. Of course there was Doris, he thought,
but he had never spoken of her. Sometimes when the longing to see her
again would come upon him, he would have talked of her to his native
wife, but he was by nature an uncommunicative man, and the thought of
how Doris must feel her loneliness touched him with remorse and made
him silent.

* * * * *

Another year passed, and matters had gone well with Brantley. Ten
months before he had dropped on one of the best patches of shell in the
Paumotus, and to-day, as he sits writing and smoking in the big room of
his house, he looks contentedly out through the open door to a little
white painted schooner that lay at anchor on the calm waters of the
lagoon. He had just come back from Tahiti with her, and the two
thousand dollars he had paid for the vessel was an easy matter for a
man who was now making a thousand dollars a month.

"What a stroke of luck!" he writes to Doris. "Had I gone back to
Sydney, where would I be now?--a mate, I suppose, on some deep-sea
ship, earning twelve or fourteen pounds a month. Another year or two like
this, and I can go back a made man. Some day, my dear, I may; but I will
come back here again. The ways of the people have become my ways."

* * * * *

He laid down his pen and came to the door, and stood thinking awhile
and listening to the gentle rustle of the palms as they swayed their
lofty plumes to the breezy trade wind.

"Yes," he thought, "I would like to go and see Doris, but I can't take
Luita, and so it cannot be. How that girl suspects me even now. When I
went to Tahiti to buy the schooner, I believe she thought she would
never see me again.... What a fool I am! Doris is all right, I suppose,
although it is a year since I had a letter ... and I--could any man
want more. I don't believe there's a soul on the island but thinks as
much of me as Luita herself does; and, by G-d! she's a pearl--even
though she is only a native girl. No, I'll stay here; 'Kapeni Paranili'
will always