or so Tom would say it was very hot, and open yet another bottle. At
last I escaped the beer by nearly dying, and then the kind old fellow
hurried away in his boat to Apatiki--another island of the group--and
came back with some bottles of claret, bought from the French trader
there. With him came two visitors--a big half-caste of middle age, and
his wife, a girl of twenty or there-about. This was Edward Pallou and
his wife Taloi.


* * * * *


I was in the house when Tom returned, enjoying a long-denied smoke.
Pallou and his wife entered and greeted me. The man was a fine,
well-set-up fellow, wiry and muscular, with deep-set eyes, and bearing
across his right cheek a heavy scar. His wife was a sweet, dainty
little creature with red lips, dazzling teeth, hazel eyes, and long
wavy hair. The first thing I noticed about her was, that instead of
squatting on a mat in native fashion, she sank into a wide chair, and
lying back enquired, with a pleasant smile and in perfect English,
whether I was feeling any better. She was very fair, even for a
Paumotuan half-caste, as I thought she must be, and I said to Pallou,
"Why, any one would take your wife to be an Englishwoman!"

"Not I," said Taloi, with a rippling laugh, as she commenced to make a
banana-leaf cigarette; "I am a full-blooded South Sea Islander. I
belong to Apatiki, and was born there. Perhaps I have white blood in
me. Who knows?--only my wise mother. But when I was twelve years old I
was adopted by a gentleman in Papeite, and he sent me to Sydney to
school. Do you know Sydney? Well, I was three years with the Misses