going to bed. Send
Noa Noah and Viaburi to me. Tell Ornfiri to make hot water. I'll be out
of my head in fifteen minutes. But I'll be all right by evening. Short
and sharp is the way it takes me. Too bad to lose the shooting. Thank
you, I'm all right."

Sheldon obeyed her instructions, rushed hot-water bottles along to her,
and then sat on the veranda vainly trying to interest himself in a two-
months-old file of Sydney newspapers. He kept glancing up and across the
compound to the grass house. Yes, he decided, the contention of every
white man in the islands was right; the Solomons was no place for a
woman.

He clapped his hands, and Lalaperu came running.

"Here, you!" he ordered; "go along barracks, bring 'm black fella Mary,
plenty too much, altogether."

A few minutes later the dozen black women of Berande were ranged before
him. He looked them over critically, finally selecting one that was
young, comely as such creatures went, and whose body bore no signs of
skin-disease.

"What name, you?" he demanded. "Sangui?"

"Me Mahua," was the answer.

"All right, you fella Mahua. You finish cook along boys. You stop along
white Mary. All the time you stop along. You savvee?"

"Me savvee," she grunted, and obeyed his gesture to go to the grass house
immediately.

"What name?" he asked Viaburi, who had just come out of the grass house.

"Big fella sick," was the answer. "White fella Mary talk 'm too much
allee time. Allee time talk 'm big fella schooner."

Sheldon nodded. He understood. It was the loss of the _Martha_ that had
brought on the fever. The fever would have come sooner or later, he
knew; but her disappointment had precipitated it. He lighted a
cigarette, and in the curling smoke of it caught visions of his English
mother, and wondered if she would understand how her son could love a
woman who cried because she could not be skipper of a schooner in the
cannibal isles.

CHAPTER XX--A MAN-TALK

The most patient man in the world is prone to impatience in love--and
Sheldon was in love. He called himself an ass a score of times a day,
and strove to contain himself by directing his mind in other channels,
but more than a score of times each day his thoughts roved back and dwelt
on Joan. It was a pretty problem she presented, and he was continually
debating with himself as to what was the best way to approach her.

He was not an adept at love-making. He had had but one