making yourself tiresome again with the visitors, Maman?
Now where is the good of that? I wish you would not start fretting with
everybody.... Yes, I shall be married. Yes, I shall be married
to-morrow. By special civil license and by the priest from La Foa.
There! It is all settled.... I hope you can find something more amusing
for our guests."

Incredible to see how quiet she was, how composed, how youthfully
unstrained. Only when her heavy lids swept over Bibi-Ri and their
glances crossed could you detect like electric charges the
unacknowledged tension behind.

"Oh, for amusement," chuckled Mother Carron, with a savage humor,
"Bibi-Ri is amused: right enough. Sacred stove--yes!... Only he says the
affair is impossible."

For the first time Zelie regarded him fairly.

"I see no reason why any one should think so. Unless he forgets--as I
never do any more--that I am the daughter of convicts."

Ah, there was steel in that girl! What? The way she said it! Very
simply. Without rancor, you understand. Letting it bite of itself.
Without a quaver from that crisis of despair in which she must have
learned to say it. In a flash I knew how the gleaming, soft,
full-blooded slip of a creature had stood up against this tremendous
aunt of hers. And could stand. And would!... And Bibi-Ri: he knew too.
His babbling protest died cold on his lips.

"My convict father married my convict mother in this convict country,"
she went on, evenly. "I was born here. I must live and die here. I could
never look to marry outside--could I?... They would say I was
tainted.... For the rest--well, I have only to please myself, I
believe."

And mother Carron nodded like a grim showman.

"Eh? What do you think of that? A wise infant--eh? Could anything be
more just and reasonable?"

And it was so. She was right. It was perfectly just: perfectly
reasonable. There you had the stark and appalling fact. For this is
Noumea--as Mother Carron reminded us in good season. This is Noumea--the
Noah's Ark toy of penology. If you expect your convicts to pair off and
to breed like free folk, you must expect their children likewise to
couple as they can--or will: free folks themselves. And with whom? Where
do you draw the line? What kind of a social formula have you left for
the second generation, reared in an out-door jail? Our wise
philanthropists who devised the experiment: I wonder if they ever
thought so far ahead. They should have been interested in