as still reeling.

"I shan't write this yarn," he assured us earnestly.

"It's too--it's too--and besides, there's no end to it."...

"_Hic finis fandi_," suggested Peters.

THE PASSION VINE

It is difficult to find an excuse for Miss Matilda. She was a
missionary's daughter, committed to the sacred cause of respectability
in a far land. Motauri was a gentleman of sorts and a scholar after his
own fashion, a high chief and a descendant of kings; but he was also a
native and a pagan. Strictly, it should have been nothing to Miss
Matilda that Motauri looked most distractingly like a young woodland
god, with a skin the exact shade of new heather honey, the ringlets of a
faun, the features of a Roman cameo and the build of a Greek athlete.

Being a chief in the flower valley of Wailoa meant that Motauri owned a
stated number of cocoanut-trees and never had to do anything except to
swim and to laugh, to chase the rainbow-fish a fathom deep and to play
divinely on the nose-flute. But being as handsome as Motauri meant that
many a maiden heart must sigh after him and flutter in strange, wild
rhythm under the compelling of his gentle glance. This was all very well
so long as the maidens were among his own people. It took a different
aspect when he turned the said glance on Miss Matilda, who was white and
slim and wore mitts to keep her hands from tanning and did crewelwork in
the veranda of her father's house behind the splendid screen of the
passion-vine....

Now falling in love with a man of color is distinctly one of the things
that are not done--that scarcely endure to be spoken of. We have it on
the very highest authority that the East has a stubborn habit of never
being the West. Where two eligible persons of opposite sex are
concerned the stark geographic, not to say ethnologic fact comes grimly
into play, and never these twain shall meet: or anyway the world agrees
they never ought.

Yet Miss Matilda had been meeting Motauri. Perhaps the passion-vine was
to blame. The passion-vine is too exuberant to be altogether
respectable. One cannot live in an atmosphere of passion-vine--and that
embraces all the heady scent and vivid tint and soft luxuriance of the
islands where life goes as sweetly as a song; the warm caress of the
trade-wind, the diamond dance of spray; the throbbing organ-pipe of the
reef, the bridal-veiling of mountain streams, the flaunting of palm and
plantain, the twinkling signal of firefl