OF THE SOUTH SEAS 423 



by the pit and the blows of her captors. She looked 

 at me coolly, but with a glint in her eye that meant, I 

 thought, contempt for all that had occurred since her 

 last hour of freedom. 



In the curious network of lines all over the worn face 

 of the princess there were suggestions of the sensual 

 lure that had made her the mistress of the court; a 

 gentle but pitiful droop to the mouth that I had no- 

 ticed persisting in the roues and sirens of Asia after 

 senility had struck away all charm. The princess re- 

 fused a third glass of wine at the table, but smoked 

 incessantly, and listened absent-mindedly to the music 

 and the songs. Her thoughts may have been of those 

 mad nights of orgy which Davey, the dentist, and 

 Brault, the composer, had described. Her cigarettes 

 were of native tobacco wrapped in pandanus leaf, as 

 the South American wraps his in corn husk. They were 

 short ; merely a few puffs. 



Afa, the tane of the lovely Evoa of the Annexe, 

 brought to the luncheon Annabelle Lee, the buxom wife 

 of Lovaina's negro chauffeur. She was a quadroon, a 

 belle of dark Kentucky, with more than a touch of the 

 tar-brush in her skin and hair, and her gaudy clothes and 

 friendly manner had won the Tahitians completely. 

 She was receiving much attention wherever she went in 

 Tahiti, for she had the fashion and language and man- 

 ners of the whites, as they knew them, and yet was 

 plainly of the colored races. The chauffeur himself, a 

 self-respecting negro, had sat at table with Lovaina 

 many times. There was in Tahiti no color-line. In 

 America a man with a drop of colored blood in his veins 

 is classed as a colored man; in Cuba a drop of white 



