onnet."

"<i Volontiers>, Madame," I said, going out on to the verandah.

The spell was broken.

Chapter LVIII

The time came for my departure from Tahiti. According to the
gracious custom of the island, presents were given me by the
persons with whom I had been thrown in contact -- baskets made
of the leaves of the cocoa-nut tree, mats of pandanus, fans;
and Tiare gave me three little pearls and three jars of
guava-jelly made with her own plump hands. When the mail-boat,
stopping for twenty-four hours on its way from Wellington to
San Francisco, blew the whistle that warned the passengers to
get on board, Tiare clasped me to her vast bosom, so that I
seemed to sink into a billowy sea, and pressed her red lips
to mine. Tears glistened in her eyes. And when we steamed
slowly out of the lagoon, making our way gingerly through the
opening in the reef, and then steered for the open sea,
a certain melancholy fell upon me. The breeze was laden still
with the pleasant odours of the land. Tahiti is very far
away, and I knew that I should never see it again. A chapter
of my life was closed, and I felt a little nearer to
inevitable death.

Not much more than a month later I was in London; and after I
had arranged certain matters which claimed my immediate
attention, thinking Mrs. Strickland might like to hear what I
knew of her husband's last years, I wrote to her. I had not
seen her since long before the war, and I had to look out her
address in the telephone-book. She made an appointment, and I went
to the trim little house on Campden Hill which she now inhabited.
She was by this time a woman of hard on sixty, but she
bore her years well, and no one would have taken her for
more than fifty. Her face, thin and not much lined, was of
the sort that ages gracefully, so that you thought in youth
she must have been a much handsomer woman than in fact she was.
Her hair, not yet very gray, was becomingly arranged,
and her black gown was modish. I remembered having heard that
her sister, Mrs. MacAndrew, outliving her husband but a couple
of years, had left money to Mrs. Strickland; and by the look
of the house and the trim maid who opened the door I judged
that it was a sum adequate to keep the widow in modest comfort.

When I was ushered into the drawing-room I found that Mrs.
Strickland had a visitor, and when I discovered who he was,
I guessed that I had been asked to come at just that time not
withou