until I had
with me her picture and her essence of soul.

Many of life's most sacred and permanent institutions are only fictions,
long entertained. My fiction became so real to me that for periods I
forgot to question it--then sometimes, at a moment when the illusion was
strongest, some impulse of reason would strike in upon and chill me,
like a sluicing from a cold bucket. It would come upon me to think of
myself as I should have appeared to any unwarned stranger, who had found
me talking, even lovemaking, with a sheet of lifeless paper. And from
that impersonal view-point I would wonder if my brain had already
crumbled to madness and imbecility. The cold sweat would bead my
forehead. My finger would creep to the trigger of my pistol and linger
there, twitching with the itch of self-destruction. But soon the smiling
lips would reassure me; the mood would pass and again I would surrender
myself to the pretense which was grateful where the truth was austere
and desolate.

I discovered in my tramps about the island's edge that this spot seemed
to be the most favored home of the orchid. This monarch of flowers
bloomed at the jungle's margin, in an infinite variety of flaunting
petals, soft colors and deeply glowing life. No other flower is so
ethereal and illusively lovely. None could be more fitted for a tribute
to as impalpable a love as I acknowledged. It became a part of my daily
program to bring back with me as I returned to the cave, masses of these
splendid blossoms which I heaped before her shrine.

I had reached the age of thirty-five and had heretofore been immune to
feminine fascinations. I had even been characterized as a woman-hater,
though this was an injustice. This new obsession, bewitching--whatever
you may choose to term it--was not momentary. In defense of my
consistency I declare that the thing required two weeks at least for its
accomplishment. And in those two weeks other affairs were developing.

Of course, I had been told, as has every traveler in the south seas,
that there is not an atoll or island left for discovery. I had been
informed that on every coral speck in the reef-strewn ocean, there is or
has been, a white man. I knew now that this was a fallacy. My island was
marked by a volcano tall enough to proclaim itself as far as a glass
could sweep the horizon from a ship's lookout, and if no pearl shell or
beche-de-mer trader, no blackbirder of the old days, no windswept vessel
of the pres