octor
again. Fearful cur, am I not?"

"Come, Etheridge," and Lawson laid his smooth, shapely hand--how
dishonest are shapely hands!--on the other's arm. "You're a little
down. Anything wrong with one's heart always gives a man a bad shaking.
There's Lalia calling us to breakfast, so I won't say any more but this:
Even if Lalia wasn't my wife's sister, and anything happened to you,
there's always a home for her in my house. I'd do that for your sake
alone, old man, putting aside the principle I go on of showing respect
to any white man's wife, even if she were a Oahu girl and had rickety
ideas of morality."

When Lawson had first met him and had carried him down to his station on
Savaii, nursed him through his illness, and treated him like a brother,
Etheridge, with the impulsive confidence of his simple nature, poured
out his thanks and told his history, and eagerly accepted Lawson's
suggestion to try his hand at trading, instead of continuing his erratic
wanderings--wanderings which could only end in his "going broke" at
Tahiti or Honolulu, Fifteen miles or so away, Lawson said, there was a
village with a good opening for a trader. How much could he put into
it? Well, he had L500 with him, and there was another thousand in
Sydney--the last of five. Ample, said his host. So one day the land
was bought, a house and store put up, and Etheridge commenced life as a
trader.

The strange tropic beauty of the place and the ways of the people soon
cast their spell over Etheridge's imaginative nature, and he was as
happy as a man possibly could be--with a knowledge that his life hung by
a thread. How slender that thread was Lawson knew, perhaps, better than
he. The German doctor had said, "You must dell him to be gareful, Mr.
Lawson. Any excidemend, any zooden drouble mit anydings; or too much
visky midout any excidemends, and he drop dead. I dell you."

*****

A month or so after he had settled, Etheridge paid his weekly visit to
Lawson, and met Lalia.

"This is my wife's sister," said Lawson; "she has been on a visit to
some friends in Tutuila, and came back in the _Iserbrook?_"

The clear-cut, refined, and beautiful features of the girl did their
work all too quickly on Etheridge. He was not a sensualist, only a
man keenly susceptible to female beauty, and this girl was.
beautiful--perhaps not so beautiful as her sister, Terere, Lawson's
wife, but with a softer and more tender light in her full, dark eyes.
And Lawso