64 MYSTIC ISLES 



Lovaina pointed out to me the man who had taken 

 away her favorite helper. He was about forty years 

 old, tall, angular, sharp-nosed, with gold eyeglasses. I 

 would have expected to meet him in the vestry of a 

 church or to have been asked bv him at a mission if I 

 were saved, but in Tahiti he had gone the way of all 

 flesh. His voice had the timbre of the preacher. He 

 had come to the hotel in an expensive, new automobile 

 to fetch cooked food for himself and Ruine. 



"Seven or eight leper that man support," said 

 Lovaina to me. "They die for him, he so good to them. 

 He help everybodee. He give them leper the Bible, 

 and sometime he go read them." 



It would be the Song of Solomon he would read to 

 Ruine. She had red hair, red black or black red, a not 

 unusual color in Tahiti, and her eyes had a glint of red 

 in their brown. She was exquisite in her silken peignoir, 

 a wreath of scarlet hibiscus-flowers on her head, and a 

 string of gorgeous baroque pearls about her rounded 

 neck. 



My room at the Tiare was in the upper story of an 

 old house that sat alone in the back garden, among the 

 domestics, automobiles, carriages, horses, pigs, and 

 fowls. The house had wide verandas all about it, and 

 the stairway outside. A few nights after I had arrived 

 in Tahiti I was writing letters on the piazza, the length 

 of the room away from the stairs. I had a lamp on my 

 table, and the noise of my type-writer hushed the sounds 

 of any one entering the apartment. It was about ten 

 o'clock, and between sentences I looked at the night. 

 The stars were in coruscating masses, the riches of the 

 heavens disclosed as only at such a cloudless hour in this 



