very least.

What could a hotel be? The New York hotel in which her poor son lived?

I did not know that hotel, I told her, but a hotel was a house in
which many persons paid to live, and some hotels had more rooms than
there were houses in all the Marquesas.

What! In one house, under one roof? By my tribe, it was true.

Did I know this woman? I was from that island and I had been in that
valley. I must have seen her.

I replied that I knew a Jeanette who answered the description
beautiful, but that she was not from Chile.

Now, My Darling Hope knit her brow. Why would the _mutoi_ take hold
of her son, as he feared?

I soothed her anxiety. The _mutoi_ walked up and down in front of
the hotel, but he would not bother her son as long as her son could
get a few piasters now and then to hand to him. The woman was rich,
and would not miss a trifling sum, five or ten piasters a month for
the _mutoi_.

But why was it forbidden for her son to live with Jeanette, being
not married to her?

That was our law, but it was seldom enforced. The _mutois_ were fat
men who carried war-clubs and struck the poor with them, but her son
was _tapu_ because of Jeanette's money.

She was at ease now, she said. Her son could not marry without her
permission. No Marquesan had ever done so. She would send the word
by the next schooner, or I might take it with me to my own island
and hand it to her son. He could then marry.

I had done her a great kindness, but one thing more. Neither she nor
Titihuti nor Water could make out what Pahorai Calizte meant by
"Coot Pae, Mama." "A.P.A. Dieu." was his commendation of her to God,
but _Coot Pae_ was not Marquesan, neither was it French. She
pronounced the words in the Marquesan way, and I knew at once.
_Coot pae_ is pronounced Coot Pye, and Coot Pye was Pahorai
Calizte's way of imitating the American for _Apae Kaoha_. "Good-by,
mama," was his quite Philadelphia closing of his letter to his mother.

I addressed an envelop to her son with The Iron Fingers That Make
Words, and gave it to My Darling Hope. A tear came in her eye. She
rubbed my bare back affectionately and caressed my nose with hers as
she smelled me solemnly. Then she went up the valley to enlighten
the hill people.

CHAPTER XXXIX

The chants of departure; night falls on the Land of the War Fleet.

On the eve of my going all the youth and beauty of Atuona crowded my
_paepae_. Water brought his _ukulele_, a Hawaiian