l you, if
you do this."

O'Shea's cruel mouth twitched and his jaws set, then he uttered a
hoarse laugh. "By God! Has it taken you two years to get jealous?"

A deadly hate gleamed in the dark, passionate eyes. "Jealous, Mother of
God! jealous of a drunken, licentious wretch such as you! I hate
you--hate you! If I had courage enough I would poison myself to be free
from you."

O'Shea's eyes emitted a dull sparkle. "I wish you would, damn you! Yet
you are game enough, you say, to kill me--and Malia?"

"Yes. But not for love of you, but because of the white blood in me. I
can't--I won't be degraded by you bringing another woman here."

"'Por Dios,' as your dad used to say before the devil took his soul,
we'll see about that, my beauty. I suppose because your father was a
d----d garlic-eating, ear-ringed Dago, and your mother a
come-by-chance Tahiti half-caste, you think he was as good as me."

"As good as you, O bloody-handed dog of an English convict. He was a
man, and the only wrong he ever did was to let me become wife to a
devil like you."

The cruel eyes were close to hers now, and the rough, brawny hands
gripped her wrists. "You spiteful Portuguese quarter-bred ----! Call me
a convict again, and I'll twist your neck like a fowl's. You she-devil!
I'd have made things easy for you--but I won't now. Do you hear?" and
the grip tightened. "Ristow's girl will be here to-morrow, and if you
don't knuckle down to her it'll be a case of 'Vamos' for you--you can
go and get a husband among the natives," and he flung her aside and
went to the god that ran him closest for his soul, next to women--his
rum-bottle.

* * * * *

O'Shea kept his word, for two days later Malia, the half-caste daughter
of Ristow, the trader at Ahunui, stepped from out her father's
whaleboat in front of O'Shea's house. The transaction was a perfectly
legitimate one, and Malia did not allow any inconvenient feeling of
modesty to interfere with such a lucrative arrangement as this, whereby
her father became possessed of a tun of oil and a bag of Chilian
dollars, and she of much finery. In those days missionaries had not
made much head-way, and gentlemen like Messrs Ristow and O'Shea took
all the wind out of the Gospel drum.

And so Malia, dressed as a native girl, with painted cheeks and bare
bosom, walked demurely up from the boat to the purchaser of her
sixteen-years'-old beauty, who, with arms folded across his broad
chest, stood in the mid