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such babies they were. In some queer way, it made an impression." It was almost as if she were apologizing for Roger's vagaries.

"As if I cared a hang, dear!" His tone was the Letitia tone again, pure and full-the tone he kept for her. Then I heard it sunk to a whisper. "For me, you are forever and forever in white." I don't think Mrs. Twining heard. She had turned her head away from them.

Though we longed for the moon, she did not rise, and Letitia bravely made ready to go. A little breeze had sprung up from the forest, and the scent of ginger struggled with the frangipani in our nostrils. The stars were very clear. We were all loath, in our own way, I think, to let the moment go. Far down the tree-smothered slope to the east, a native voice rose through our silence, piercing it with melancholy song-some late farer from a feast, winding up a green trail to his village.

"Your father comes back to-morrow?" It was Aunt Miriam who asked it, her hands on the girl's shoulders.

"By ten in the morning, he said." Aunt Miriam kissed her good-night. "I'll go down and see him, and fetch you back with me, if he'll let me."

"You? And why not I?" Roger broke in.

"You'll be busy, my dear, in the morning. Your work-your callingyour sacred task-must come first of all. Your people mustn't think you put even Letitia" she kissed the girl-"before them. Of course you will see Professor Quayle but I must see him, too. Your uncle would have wished it done in that way."

tone.

There was no gainsaying her

"Can't I bring father up to you?" Even Letitia knew that Mrs. Twining never left the Mission.

"My dear, I stand in my husband's place. I must go to him for Roger. And you children must start at once. It is late, I'm afraid. Good-night." She clasped the girl to her, then kissed Roger and went into the house.

I was privately amused that Mrs. Twining's conservatism should.choose to take, in this instance, so European a form. The gesture didn't "go" with, her, but her firmness did, and I saw

afresh how Roger was both supported and handicapped. Wonderful Aunt Miriam!

We

We stood, the three of us, looking at the stars for a moment before starting down the trail. A faint radiance in the east showed that the moon was on her way to us. How I wish we had waited for her-defied the world, the flesh, and the devil; prolonged that moment, and seen her rise! But we did not. plunged into the forest on our downward path-I in front, like a link-boy; Letitia and Roger (the darlings!), hand in hand, behind me. My heart was very light over the little matter of creeds; they were so beautiful, those two, together. That, of course, was the devil getting well down to his part-my lightness of heart, I mean.

you.

The next day was, as it were, the last; and I hardly know how to chronicle it for I will at least leave out every irrelevant thing, though it was packed, wilfully, with irrelevancies. The native boy who came running to Roger at dawn, because his father was dying; the snake I killed after breakfast in the garden; the sudden shower that came drenchingly down and delayed Mrs. Twining's expedition to the town-all those things were irrelevant, though they figured in the general irritation of our hearts. Personally, I could hardly wait for the old ex-chief to die, leaving Roger free, or until Aunt Miriam should return, leading Letitia as a bride. I could not read; it was too wet to stroll; I was of no use to any human being. The time seemed very long before Mrs. Twining came back from her unusual journeygray as wood-ash, and without Letitia. Roger had not yet returned.

She faced me as I met her at the steps, then flung up her hands above her noble head, and passed by me without speaking. Inside the house I heard one low groan. I rushed to her, for I was frightened. "Take care of Roger. Keep him away from me," she said, in a voice that sounded rusty with age, and passed on toher own room. I heard the key turn.

When Roger did come back, an hour later, exhausted and eager, I could not help him. Letitia had not come. His aunt was locked in her own room, and a terrible silence brooded over the scene.

Even Loo seemed to be performing his tasks in a vacuum, for I had neither seen nor heard him.

Roger got admittance to Mrs. Twining's room, and I spent the longest halfhour I have ever lived, while I waited for him on the headland amid the cocoa

palms, looking out to sea. I say "waited." I had no knowledge of whether he would come to me; but there I could be either reached or avoided, and even a madman would know that I was discreetly out of earshot of the house.

Finally Roger stood before me, in white from head to foot-even his face and his hands were white as the linen he wore. I held out my hand; he took it, and with sudden violence pulled me to my feet. The devil had got in his work.

"Has she told you?" "Nothing." I was trembling-physically, I mean. But the young athlete before me stood like a rock. "Will you go down at once and see Letitia ?"

"For God's sake, go yourself!" I did not know what was the matter, but I felt sure that neither man nor woman, neither science nor creed, could withstand Roger Twining when he looked like that.

"She lied to me last night." "Who? What?"

"Aunt Cheyne.'

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'Mabel Cheyne?" I had forgotten the name. I tried to pull my hand from his, to get far enough away from him to focus him, to define his aberration. But his hand was a trap for mine. "There was no Mabel Cheyne." "What of it?"

"Letitia is my sister."

I sank back so suddenly that, involuntarily, he let me go. There was nothing to add to that statement; no need to trace its birth and growth from Aunt Miriam's sudden fear, the night before, to the corroboration she had received that morning from Professor Quayle. No need to assemble the evidence; it had been assembled, put together, with tense accuracy, by two suffering, grayhaired people that morning..

Roger Twining had no great desire for speech, I could see. But a few more

words were wrung from him: "Letitia never knew until to-day that she was an orphan, that she had been adopted. I'm older. I remembered her, you see, without realizing. You must go to her and talk to her. I am going off to be alone." And he turned from me toward the forest. Just once he looked back: "Don't be afraid; I'll be back in a few hours. Not to lunch. Not to lunch. I don't want any." He disappeared among the huge breadfruit-trees.

I didn't go to Letitia. I would in time, I thought, if Roger insisted; but not now, not until I had some notion of what to say. I felt, too, that I must not leave at once. I did not wish to go farther away from Roger, or farther away from Mrs. Twining. Each pulled me with invisible cords, as though I were their defender. When I could think of ten words I could say to Letitia Quayle without touching on a raw wound, I would go. Just then I could not stir.

All sense of time left me. In my retreat I was blind to the sun that might have told me how the hours were passing. Forward and back, forward and back, I went in my dreary mind, from one impossible course of action to another. All through those hours I grew at once more inert and more ashamed of my inertia. My will rose with great gasps to lift me from where I sat; then fell back paralyzed before this or that clear perception of my helplessness. It was the heat of early afternoon, penetrating my high palm roof, that drove me back at last to the house.

Luncheon lay on the table, untasted and undisturbed, hardened into a disgusting effigy of food. Mrs. Twining met me in another room. Her face was drawn and twisted, as though she had had a "stroke," but she spoke clearly: "Where is Roger?"

I shrugged my shoulders vaguely. "Safe off there, somewhere-alone." "Go and find him.”

This seemed to be just the urge I needed. I started off obediently. She must have divined that I knew, for as I left the porch she said, in a very low

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took her. But when Roger remembered, last night, I suddenly grew afraid. Just for an instant they looked alike. So I lied."

I walked slowly, hardly directing my footsteps, except that of course I went the way I had seen Roger go. My feet dragged; but by this time my brain was blessedly numb, and I was no longer afraid to present myself with my errand undone. I had lost the sense of faithlessness to duty.

I found him at last beside the musical waterfall, in the deep-shaded, vine-hung ravine. He had wandered back to that scene of passionate innocence, and now sat by the pool where, a few days before, I had seen her drink from the cup he held. He did not question me as I sat down beside him; in silence, in our respective ways, we pieced together the rent fragments of that most beautiful dream. We must both have been very tired, for Twining did not speak at all and I found my eyes drowsily closing to match that blessed anæsthesia of the spirit. The only sounds I heard were the unchanging sounds of Nature, and the remembered voices of my two friends at play in Eden. I saw the green dazzle of leaves, the tender vividness of blossoms, and, now and then, moving as by right among those natural sweetnesses, the white figure of Letitia. I must almost have dreamed in earnest, for during a little space of time I recaptured the unrecapturable. It was as it had been, and we were happy, out of the world.

Finally Roger stirred violently, and I shook myself awake to see him standing, with that face of rock, beside me, staring. Just for a moment I thought it was a dream come true, for, though the things about me were sharp with reality, Letitia stood there before us in the flesh, and spoke the same white Letitia who had come to us laughing from behind a palm-tree.

"I ran away," she said, very quietly. "Father doesn't know. I thought you would be here. So I came, straight.'

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She smiled at me-wonderful child! and held out her hand to Roger. The blood came back into his face, but he did not take her hand. He folded his arms instead, and bent his dark eyes on the ground.

The girl shook her head very sadly, and smiled more sadly still. "May I sit down?" And she went to the rock where she had sat drinking from the cup he held.

If I had not been able to obey Roger's earlier command to go and talk to Letitia Quayle, I could still less talk to her there, before him. I turned, in silence, to go up the trail down which the white figure had just come.

"Don't go." She stopped me. "Roger and I don't mind. And I'd rather you would hear what I have to say. It's better so. Come, Roger, sit down."

She placed me, by her tone, where they had always tacitly placed me in the days now so diabolically reproduced. I was again their faithful fool. She did not touch him, but she beckoned him to sit near her. To my surprise, he sank down in the exact spot she pointed to. I drew off to a little distance, my heart near to breaking.

"Father means to take me away on the Rarotonga to-morrow," she said, "and of course he didn't think I'd want to see you again. But I had to say goodbye, didn't I?"

She tucked her feet up under her like a little girl, and, like a little girl, began plaiting the fronds of a fern. Roger still had not spoken. I did not wonder. How could he speak to a child like that of the dark things that lay between them? What words could he use? And as I looked once more, stealthily, at him, my pity gushed out afresh; for he, too, seemed unready for life, a beautiful young body with soul scarce budded. Yet if he had been the unformed lad I felt him, he would have stretched out his hand and taken hers-as of old.

"It is good-bye, Roger dear, I suppose.' pose." She had thrown off her hat, and now she bent her head so low over her frond-weaving that I could not see the little peak of hair. "And never again, until we are very old. . . ." Oh, how softly her words came, scarce audible above the waterfall! "I didn't know anything could hurt so. But we're hurt together. That's one thing, isn't it?"

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'Yes, that's one thing.' It was the first time he had spoken, but his voice struck the very note of hers. I turned my head away.

"You won't even take my hand, will you?" she went on, in her gentle, wondering tone.

He shook his head.

I got up softly, meaning to leave them -to lose myself, at least, just beyond in the trail. I could not endure to be there. A terrible altar was slowly being raised by that secret waterfall; terrible as the altar that legend said had once abided in that spot. It was not meant for me to see the rearing of that sacrificial stone. But Letitia held me with a gesture of her little hand. "No, you must not go. We must not be alone. I ran away. It wouldn't be fair."

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"Then you must come with me." I knew only that this poignancy must not be prolonged.

"I will." And she got up, flinging her fronds away. "Good-bye, Roger." She did not hold out her hand. He stood five paces away from her, his leaden eyes still seeking the ground.

"Not just my hand-once?" she pleaded with him.

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And again he shook his head. "Because it is good-bye." Nothing broke the silence.

Then suddenly she moved to his side -close to him, although she did not touch him. I heard her voice change utterly. I saw her face flush, and her eyes draw his unwilling eyes to her. Because-listen, Roger-if you choose, I'll stay forever. I don't understand anything. I don't believe anything, and nothing they say makes any difference. I love you better than the whole world, or what you call God, or anything. No

one is real but you the rest is just what people get out of books!"

She had flung her head back as she spoke, and I saw her face unforgettably there before me-changed as her voice was changed, the face of a woman hard beset, tragic with passion, beautiful with utter unconsciousness of self. The rite was being accomplished before me. I stood, rooted.

Then Roger Twining did a strange thing. He leaned to her and passed his shaking hand over her beautiful, ageless face as you would pass your hand over a mask. She closed her eyes to his touch, bending forward in complete docility. When he took his hand away, she opened her eyes and smiled up at him as she had smiled of old. The face that had leaped out at us as from an immemorial dark myth was gone, and there again stood the fresh apparition of the forest.

"Good-bye, Letitia. Malcolm will take you back. Good-bye, dear." And Roger grew young again before my eyes, a boy, biting his lips not to cry.

"Good-bye!" Her voice chimed in with his, and I led her away from the storied spot. Before the bushes closed over us I looked back once. Roger was lying face down on the ground, his shoulders heaving. Letitia's eyes inquired of mine.

"He's all right, dear," I soothed her. "I'll take care of him. It's just hell for a little. Don't look back. Don't do anything that would be cruel to him."

I spoke as to a child, and like a child she followed me unquestioningly, up the trail.

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