a lover, and they all knew who it was. But there was
not the smallest indication to guide him. He never saw Ethel with
anyone; no one showed a wish to be with her, or treated him in a manner
that seemed strange. Wild rage seized him, and having no one to vent it
on he drank more and more heavily. A little while before I came to the
island he had had another attack of _delirium tremens_.

I met Ethel at the house of a man called Caster, who lived two or three
miles from Apia with a native wife. I had been playing tennis with him
and when we were tired he suggested a cup of tea. We went into the house
and in the untidy living-room found Ethel chatting with Mrs Caster.

"Hulloa, Ethel," he said, "I didn't know you were here."

I could not help looking at her with curiosity. I tried to see what
there was in her to have excited in Lawson such a devastating passion.
But who can explain these things? It was true that she was lovely; she
reminded one of the red hibiscus, the common flower of the hedgerow in
Samoa, with its grace and its languor and its passion; but what
surprised me most, taking into consideration the story I knew even then
a good deal of, was her freshness and simplicity. She was quiet and a
little shy. There was nothing coarse or loud about her; she had not the
exuberance common to the half-caste; and it was almost impossible to
believe that she could be the virago that the horrible scenes between
husband and wife, which were now common knowledge, indicated. In her
pretty pink frock and high-heeled shoes she looked quite European. You
could hardly have guessed at that dark background of native life in
which she felt herself so much more at home. I did not imagine that she
was at all intelligent, and I should not have been surprised if a man,
after living with her for some time, had found the passion which had
drawn him to her sink into boredom. It suggested itself to me that in
her elusiveness, like a thought that presents itself to consciousness
and vanishes before it can be captured by words, lay her peculiar charm;
but perhaps that was merely fancy, and if I had known nothing about her
I should have seen in her only a pretty little half-caste like another.

She talked to me of the various things which they talk of to the
stranger in Samoa, of the journey, and whether I had slid down the water
rock at Papaseea, and if I meant to stay in a native village. She talked
to me of Scotland, and perhaps I notice