surd illusions of
Christianity that they have souls."

"What is it that thou art saying to the doctor?" asked Ata
suspiciously. "Thou wilt not go?"

"If it please thee I will stay, poor child."

Ata flung herself on her knees before him, and clasped his
legs with her arms and kissed them. Strickland looked at Dr.
Coutras with a faint smile.

"In the end they get you, and you are helpless in their hands.
White or brown, they are all the same."

Dr. Coutras felt that it was absurd to offer expressions of
regret in so terrible a disaster, and he took his leave.
Strickland told Tane, the boy, to lead him to the village.
Dr. Coutras paused for a moment, and then he addressed himself
to me.

"I did not like him, I have told you he was not sympathetic to
me, but as I walked slowly down to Taravao I could not prevent
an unwilling admiration for the stoical courage which enabled
him to bear perhaps the most dreadful of human afflictions.
When Tane left me I told him I would send some medicine that
might be of service; but my hope was small that Strickland
would consent to take it, and even smaller that, if he did,
it would do him good. I gave the boy a message for Ata that
I would come whenever she sent for me. Life is hard, and Nature
takes sometimes a terrible delight in torturing her children.
It was with a heavy heart that I drove back to my comfortable
home in Papeete."

For a long time none of us spoke.

"But Ata did not send for me," the doctor went on, at last,
"and it chanced that I did not go to that part of the island
for a long time. I had no news of Strickland. Once or twice
I heard that Ata had been to Papeete to buy painting
materials, but I did not happen to see her. More than two
years passed before I went to Taravao again, and then it was
once more to see the old chiefess. I asked them whether they
had heard anything of Strickland. By now it was known
everywhere that he had leprosy. First Tane, the boy, had left
the house, and then, a little time afterwards, the old woman
and her grandchild. Strickland and Ata were left alone with
their babies. No one went near the plantation, for, as you
know, the natives have a very lively horror of the disease,
and in the old days when it was discovered the sufferer was killed;
but sometimes, when the village boys were scrambling about
the hills, they would catch sight of the white man, with
his great red beard, wandering about. They fled in terro