ce. We had all the champagne we could
drink and liqueurs to follow. Oh, I'd made up my mind to do
things well. And afterwards we danced in the drawing-room. I was
not so fat, then, and I always loved dancing."

The drawing-room at the Hotel de la Fleur was a small room,
with a cottage piano, and a suite of mahogany furniture,
covered in stamped velvet, neatly arranged around the walls.
On round tables were photograph albums, and on the walls
enlarged photographs of Tiare and her first husband, Captain
Johnson. Still, though Tiare was old and fat, on occasion we
rolled back the Brussels carpet, brought in the maids and one
or two friends of Tiare's, and danced, though now to the
wheezy music of a gramaphone. On the verandah the air was
scented with the heavy perfume of the tiare, and overhead the
Southern Cross shone in a cloudless sky.

Tiare smiled indulgently as she remembered the gaiety of a
time long passed.

"We kept it up till three, and when we went to bed I don't
think anyone was very sober. I had told them they could have
my trap to take them as far as the road went, because after
that they had a long walk. Ata's property was right away in a
fold of the mountain. They started at dawn, and the boy I
sent with them didn't come back till next day.

"Yes, that's how Strickland was married."

Chapter LII

I suppose the next three years were the happiest of
Strickland's life. Ata's house stood about eight kilometres
from the road that runs round the island, and you went to it
along a winding pathway shaded by the luxuriant trees of the
tropics. It was a bungalow of unpainted wood, consisting of
two small rooms, and outside was a small shed that served as a
kitchen. There was no furniture except the mats they used as
beds, and a rocking-chair, which stood on the verandah.
Bananas with their great ragged leaves, like the tattered
habiliments of an empress in adversity, grew close up to the house.
There was a tree just behind which bore alligator pears,
and all about were the cocoa-nuts which gave the land
its revenue. Ata's father had planted crotons round his property,
and they grew in coloured profusion, gay and brilliant;
they fenced the land with flame. A mango grew in front
of the house, and at the edge of the clearing were two
flamboyants, twin trees, that challenged the gold of the
cocoa-nuts with their scarlet flowers.

Here Strickland lived, coming seldom to Papeete, on the
prod