ho had come out to the
islands forty years before as mate of a sailing vessel. He had been a
blacksmith, a trader, a planter, and at one time fairly well-to-do; but,
ruined by the great hurricane of the nineties, he had now nothing to
live on but a small plantation of coconut trees. He had had four native
wives and, as he told you with a cracked chuckle, more children than he
could count. But some had died and some had gone out into the world, so
that now the only one left at home was Ethel.

"She's a peach," said Nelson, the supercargo of the _Moana_. "I've given
her the glad eye once or twice, but I guess there's nothing doing."

"Old Brevald's not that sort of a fool, sonny," put in another, a man
called Miller. "He wants a son-in-law who's prepared to keep him in
comfort for the rest of his life."

It was distasteful to Lawson that they should speak of the girl in that
fashion. He made a remark about the departing mail and so distracted
their attention. But next evening he went again to the pool. Ethel was
there; and the mystery of the sunset, the deep silence of the water, the
lithe grace of the coconut trees, added to her beauty, giving it a
profundity, a magic, which stirred the heart to unknown emotions. For
some reason that time he had the whim not to speak to her. She took no
notice of him. She did not even glance in his direction. She swam about
the green pool. She dived, she rested on the bank, as though she were
quite alone: he had a queer feeling that he was invisible. Scraps of
poetry, half forgotten, floated across his memory, and vague
recollections of the Greece he had negligently studied in his school
days. When she had changed her wet clothes for dry ones and sauntered
away he found a scarlet hibiscus where she had been. It was a flower
that she had worn in her hair when she came to bathe and, having taken
it out on getting into the water, had forgotten or not cared to put in
again. He took it in his hands and looked at it with a singular emotion.
He had an instinct to keep it, but his sentimentality irritated him, and
he flung it away. It gave him quite a little pang to see it float down
the stream.

He wondered what strangeness it was in her nature that urged her to go
down to this hidden pool when there was no likelihood that anyone
should be there. The natives of the islands are devoted to the water.
They bathe, somewhere or other, every day, once always, and often twice;
but they bathe in ba