after which she brooded by the fire till the children, running out of school,
announced the teacher's lunch hour.

August braced up again for a little while. The master thought of the trouble
they had with Ayacanora in "Westward Ho", and was comforted,
and tackled his romance again. Then the schoolmistress fell sick
and things went wrong. The groceries went down faster than ever,
and the house got very dirty, and began to have a native smell about it.
August grew fat, and lazy, and dirty, and less reliable on washing-days,
or when there was anything special to do in the house.
"The savage blood is strong," thought the teacher, "and she is beginning
to long for her own people and free unconventional life."
One morning -- on a washing-day, too, as it happened -- she called out,
before the teacher and his wife were up, that the Maoris
who supplied them with milk were away, and she had promised
to go up and milk the cow and bring the milk down. The teacher
gave her permission. One of the scholars usually brought the milk early.
Lunch time came and no August, no milk -- strangest of all,
only half the school children. The teacher put on his hat,
and went up to the pa once more. He found August squatted
in the midst of a circle of relations. She was entertaining them
with one of a series of idealistic sketches of the teacher's domestic life,
in which she showed a very vivid imagination, and exhibited
an unaccountable savage sort of pessimism. Her intervals of absence
had been occupied in this way from the first. The astounding slanders
she had circulated concerning the teacher's private life
came back, bit by bit, to his ears for a year afterwards,
and her character sketches of previous teachers, and her own relations
-- for she spared nobody -- would have earned a white woman
a long and well-merited term of imprisonment for criminal libel.