n
hundred dollars. Very well. It will be seven years before your trees
begin to bear. Seven times fifteen hundred is ten thousand five hundred
dollars--more than you possess, and all eaten up by the boys' wages, with
nothing to pay for bungalow, building, tools, quinine, trips to Sydney,
and so forth."

Sheldon shook his head gravely. "You'll have to abandon the idea."

"But I won't go to Sydney," she cried. "I simply won't. I'll buy in to
the extent of my money as a small partner in some other plantation. Let
me buy in in Berande!"

"Heaven forbid!" he cried in such genuine dismay that she broke into
hearty laughter.

"There, I won't tease you. Really, you know, I'm not accustomed to
forcing my presence where it is not desired. Yes, yes; I know you're
just aching to point out that I've forced myself upon you ever since I
landed, only you are too polite to say so. Yet as you said yourself, it
was impossible for me to go away, so I had to stay. You wouldn't let me
go to Tulagi. You compelled me to force myself upon you. But I won't
buy in as partner with any one. I'll buy Pari-Sulay, but I'll put only
ten boys on it and clear slowly. Also, I'll invest in some old ketch and
take out a trading license. For that matter, I'll go recruiting on
Malaita."

She looked for protest, and found it in Sheldon's clenched hand and in
every line of his clean-cut face.

"Go ahead and say it," she challenged. "Please don't mind me. I'm--I'm
getting used to it, you know. Really I am."

"I wish I were a woman so as to tell you how preposterously insane and
impossible it is," he blurted out.

She surveyed him with deliberation, and said:

"Better than that, you are a man. So there is nothing to prevent your
telling me, for I demand to be considered as a man. I didn't come down
here to trail my woman's skirts over the Solomons. Please forget that I
am accidentally anything else than a man with a man's living to make."

Inwardly Sheldon fumed and fretted. Was she making game of him? Or did
there lurk in her the insidious unhealthfulness of unwomanliness? Or was
it merely a case of blank, staring, sentimental, idiotic innocence?

"I have told you," he began stiffly, "that recruiting on Malaita is
impossible for a woman, and that is all I care to say--or dare."

"And I tell you, in turn, that it is nothing of the sort. I've sailed
the _Miele_ here, master, if you please, all the way from Tahiti--even if
I