om which to
draw the protective formulae of respectability. Even in the lands of the
passion-vine, the Pastor Speners will inevitably gather such formulae
about them as a snail secretes its shell....

"Undeniably," he said, abstractedly, "we have our perplexities. Guidance
is not always forthcoming in these matters. Would you take the little
money we have put by--you remember we were going to purchase a new oil
lamp for the chapel--would you take that money to buy yellow ribbons for
Jeremiah's Loo?"

"Why does Jeremiah's Loo need ribbons?" asked Miss Matilda.

"She is going to marry that tramp shell-buyer from Papeete. At least she
consents to a ceremony, if she can have the ribbons. A wild girl. I've
never had much hold over her.... It would be in some sort a bribe, I
admit--"

Father and daughter were seated in the arbored veranda at the daily
solemn rite of tea. For many years Pastor Spener had been used to hold
forth on sins and vanities at this hour before twilight. For many years
the meek partner of his joys and sorrows had assisted there, dispensing
the scant manna of dry toast and tapping the prim bulk of the
tea-urn--that sure rock of respectability the world around. And since
she had passed to the tiny cemetery on the hillside, it had not been
easy to alter the patriarchal custom; not easy always to remember that
the place across from him was now filled by another, a younger, and in
the ways of the world and the flesh, a wholly innocent auditor.

* * * * *

Ordinarily Miss Matilda did little to remind him. Ordinarily she
listened with the same meek deference. But Miss Matilda's state of mind
for some time past had been very far from ordinary; it chanced that on
this particular afternoon the private, the very private, affairs of Miss
Matilda had brought her to a condition altogether extraordinary--almost
reckless.

"You don't know the man," she suggested, "or anything about him."

He blinked.

"I don't--no. Nothing good."

"Still you are willing to marry them."

Now this was a clear departure, and a daring one, but considering all
things perhaps not strange.

For the last thirty minutes, since the pastor's return from the village
below, Miss Matilda had been conscious of a tension in the domestic air.
Up to his mention of Jeremiah's Loo an oppressive silence had brooded,
and from his manner of eyeing her over his teacup there was reason to
fear that something more