the man Gregson should have urged her the same
way. But so they did, reason fusing with desire like spray with wind,
and all conspiring to loose her from the firm hold of habit and
training.

* * * * *

"We can go now--this minute," Motauri was whispering. "There are boats
to be had below on the beach. We can reach Huapu before morning. None
shall see us go."

"You forget the path--the people--" She could hardly frame the words
with her lips.

"And Gregson's lights on the chapel--!"

But Motauri laughed low for love and pride.

"I do not use a path. Am I a village-dweller to need steps to my feet?
The mountain is path enough for me. That way!... Straight down to the
shore."

"By the ravine?" she cried stricken. "Impossible! It has never been
done. No one can climb down there. It is death!"

"It is life!" With the word he swept her up like a wisp of a thing in
his strong arms. "And also I am not 'no one,' but your captor,
Hokoolele. I have caught my star from the sky. See--thus is it done!"...

* * * * *

Such was the elopement of Miss Matilda, when she left her father's house
and her father's faith in very much the same manner as her remote
maternal ancestor went about the same sort of affair somewhere back in
the Stone Age. And in truth Miss Matilda was living the Stone Age for
the half hour it took Motauri to get them both down the untracked
mountain side. How they managed she never afterward knew. Not that she
slept, or fainted, or indulged in any twentieth century tantrum. But it
was all too tense to hold.

Of that descent she retained chiefly a memory of the stream and its
voices, now low and urgent, now babbling and chuckling in her ear. At
times they groped through its luminous mists, again waded from stone to
stone in the current or lowered themselves by its brink among the
tangled roots. It hurried them, hid them, showed them the way, set the
high pulse for their hearts and the pace for their purpose like an
exultant accomplice. Nor did Miss Matilda shrink from its ardor.

Once embarked, she had no further fear. Unguessed forces awoke in her.
With the hands that had never handled anything rougher than crewelwork
she chose her grip along the tough ladder of looped lianas. As
confidently as a creature of the wild she sprang across a gulf, or threw
herself to the cliff, or slipped to the man's waiting clasp on the next
lower ledge. Mass