ies at dusk--one cannot live
with all this and confine one's emotions to a conventional pattern of
gray and blue worsted yarns. At least one has trouble in so doing while
the thrill and spring of youth remain.

They remained with Miss Matilda, though guarded by natural discretion.
Nothing could have been cooler than the gleam of her starched gingham,
as she moved sedately down the mountain path to chapel of a Sunday
morning. Nothing more demure than the droop of her lashes under the rim
of the severe, Quakerish bonnet, as she smote the wheezy old melodeon
for the dusky choir. In that flawless face, a little faded, a little
wearied, you would have sought vainly for any hint of hard repression,
for any ravaging of secret revolt--unless, like Hull Gregson, the
trader, you had made a despairing study of it and had kept its image
before your hot eyes throughout long, sleepless nights; unless, more
particularly, like Motauri, you had been privileged to see it by the
moonlight that sifts through the rifts of the passion-vine. Then,
perhaps....

Certainly her excellent father would have been the last unprompted and
of his own motion, to develop any such suspicion. Pastor Spener had
learned to fight shy of so many suspicions, so many discomfortable
questions. And this was well. Otherwise he might have been led to wonder
occasionally at his own presence and his own work; at the whole imposed
and artificial shadow of a bleak civilization upon these sunny isles,
these last remnants of an earthly paradise.

He seldom permitted himself to wonder about anything except the singular
inadequacy of mission support and the rising cost per head of making
converts, and keeping them. But there were times when he chanced to
consider, perhaps, some drunken derelict outsprawled by a hospitable
breadfruit, or again some lovely sea-born creature of his flock,
stumbling past in all the naive absurdity of Mother Hubbard and
brogans--these were moments that brought doubt to the good pastor;
moments when he glimpsed the unanswered problem of commingled races, of
white exile and brown host, of lonely invader and docile subject.

"We have our little trials--" he said, and smoothed them rather
fretfully, and as speedily as might be, from his pink, bald brow and
laid them with the well-ordered weft of ungrayed hair atop.

For had he not also his mission, his infant class, his home, his books,
his reports?--a whole solid and established institution fr