s very sad and lonely now, and as night came on she lay down
in her end of the house and slept, while the other four people sat round
the fire and talked and smoked.

In the middle of the night the four slaves got up and went away to the
village, for they wanted to be there when the boat from the ship came
ashore.

At daylight the ship was close in, and the people in the village saw a
boat lowered. Then a cry of astonishment burst from them when they
saw the boat pull straight in over the reef and land at Takai, about a
hundred yards from the house of Ninia, the white man's widow.

Only one person got out, and then the boat pushed off again and pulled
back to the ship.

*****

Ninia the widow had risen, and was rolling up the mat she had slept
upon, when a figure darkened the doorway. She turned wonderingly to
see who it was that had come over so early from the village, when the
stranger, who was a tall, graceful young girl, sprang forward, and,
folding her arms around her, said, sobbing with joy--

"My mother... The Christ-God hath brought me back to thee again."

BALDWIN'S LOISE--Miss Lambert.

Her mother was a full-blooded native--a woman of Anaa, in the Chain
Islands--her father a dissolute and broken white wanderer. At the age
of ten she was adopted by a wealthy South Sea trading captain, living
on the East Coast of New Zealand. He, with his childless wife, educated,
cared for, and finally loved her, as they once loved a child of their
own, dead twenty years before.

At sixteen Loise was a woman; and in the time that had passed since the
morning she had seen her reckless, beach-combing father carried ashore
at Nukutavake with a skinful of whisky and his pockets full of the
dollars for which he had sold her, the tongue and memories of her
mother's race had become, seemingly, utterly forgotten.

*****

But only seemingly; for sometimes in the cold winter months, when savage
southerly gales swept over the cloud-blackened ocean from the white
fields of Antarctic ice and smote the New Zealand coast with chilling
blast, the girl would crouch beside the fire in Mrs. Lambert's
drawing-room, and covering herself with warm rugs, stare into the
glowing coals until she fell asleep.

She had not forgotten.

One day a visitor came to see her adopted father. He was captain of a
small trading schooner running to the Paumotus--her mother's land--and
although old Lambert had long since given up his trading bus