I had treated her, and invent things that never took place.
Even on a dot of a coral island there is gossip and slander and a Kanaka
Mrs. Grundy, and Rosie was doing her best to ruin me, so that I was
avoided, and the King and the other high muck-a-mucks went to Tyson's,
the opposition trader, and tabooed my store till I didn't know which way
to turn.

I ought to have sold out and quit, and left Rosie on the other fellow
like Feltenshaw had done me. But I loved her for what she had been to
me, and for the poor mite moldering under ground, and so just took my
medicine for a whole miserable year and let it go at that. Every
misfortune I've had in life I seem to trace to what was good and
generous in me. Certainly if I'd shaken her off then and there, I would
have been a happier man, and been saved things that have since almost
drove me mad.

The upshot of it was that finally I did sell the station to a couple of
Chinamen--brothers--and I would like to say right here there never was a
whiter pair than these two, or any that stood up straighter to a
bargain. Once the main price was fixed, there was no haggling over
valuations, nor any backwardness or suspicion, though in the rush I was
in not to hold the schooner over long, it would have been easy to beat
me out of a hundred dollars or two. They pulled us off to the vessel--me
and Rosie and them three camphor-wood chests with the bell locks and a
big roll of mats and a keg of silver dollars--and an hour later six
years of my life had sunk with the palms, as lost and disappeared as the
schooner's wake in the sea behind us.

After the Line Apia struck me as a wonderfully bustling, busy little
place, and I took to it like a man does who's had nothing but coral and
coconuts to look at till all the world seems nothing else. It came over
me what a prisoner I'd been up there, and how much I had paid in
unthought-of ways for that keg of Chile money. Rosie, too, brightened up
considerable with the novelty of it all, and was so gay and laughing and
like her old self that I was gladder than ever at having made the
change.

It didn't take me long to size up conditions; and the better part of
that keg soon put me in possession of a two-story house and store in the
center of the town on the main street, with a pretty good stock taken
over from the widow of the man who had lately died there. I was hardly
what could be called a trader any more, what with a place so big and
fine, with