raining."

Among other things, she burned the pestilential hospital, quarrelled with
Sheldon over the dead, and, in anger, set her own men to work building a
new, and what she called a decent, hospital. She robbed the windows of
their lawn and muslin curtains, replacing them with gaudy calico from the
trade-store, and made herself several gowns. When she wrote out a list
of goods and clothing for herself, to be sent down to Sydney by the first
steamer, Sheldon wondered how long she had made up her mind to stay.

She was certainly unlike any woman he had ever known or dreamed of. So
far as he was concerned she was not a woman at all. She neither
languished nor blandished. No feminine lures were wasted on him. He
might have been her brother, or she his brother, for all sex had to do
with the strange situation. Any mere polite gallantry on his part was
ignored or snubbed, and he had very early given up offering his hand to
her in getting into a boat or climbing over a log, and he had to
acknowledge to himself that she was eminently fitted to take care of
herself. Despite his warnings about crocodiles and sharks, she persisted
in swimming in deep water off the beach; nor could he persuade her, when
she was in the boat, to let one of the sailors throw the dynamite when
shooting fish. She argued that she was at least a little bit more
intelligent than they, and that, therefore, there was less liability of
an accident if she did the shooting. She was to him the most masculine
and at the same time the most feminine woman he had ever met.

A source of continual trouble between them was the disagreement over
methods of handling the black boys. She ruled by stern kindness, rarely
rewarding, never punishing, and he had to confess that her own sailors
worshipped her, while the house-boys were her slaves, and did three times
as much work for her as he had ever got out of them. She quickly saw the
unrest of the contract labourers, and was not blind to the danger, always
imminent, that both she and Sheldon ran. Neither of them ever ventured
out without a revolver, and the sailors who stood the night watches by
Joan's grass house were armed with rifles. But Joan insisted that this
reign of terror had been caused by the reign of fear practised by the
white men. She had been brought up with the gentle Hawaiians, who never
were ill-treated nor roughly handled, and she generalized that the
Solomon Islanders, under kind treat