e
eastward position, he managed to live and himself be none the worse,
while those who knew him were certainly the better.

When Roscoe had finished his tale, Mrs. Falchion said: "Mr. Boldrick
must be a very interesting man;" and her eyes wandered up to the great
hole in the mountain-side, and lingered there. "As I said, I must meet
him," she added; "men of individuality are rare." Then: "That great
'hole in the wall' is, of course, a natural formation."

"Yes," said Roscoe. "Nature seems to have made it for Boldrick. He uses
it as a storehouse."

"Who watches it while he is away?" she said. "There is no door to the
place, of course."

Roscoe smiled enigmatically. "Men do not steal up here: that is the
unpardonable crime; any other may occur and go unpunished; not it."

The thought seemed to strike Mrs. Falchion. "I might have known!" she
said. "It is the same in the South Seas among the natives--Samoans,
Tongans, Fijians, and others. You can--as you know, Mr. Roscoe,"--her
voice had a subterranean meaning,--"travel from end to end of those
places, and, until the white man corrupts them, never meet with a case
of stealing; you will find them moral too in other ways until the white
man corrupts them. But sometimes the white man pays for it in the end."

Her last words were said with a kind of dreaminess, as though they had
no purpose; but though she sat now idly looking into the valley beneath,
I could see that her eyes had a peculiar glance, which was presently
turned on Roscoe, then withdrawn again. On him the effect was so far
disturbing that he became a little pale, but I noticed that he met her
glance unflinchingly and then looked at me, as if to see in how far I
had been affected by her speech. I think I confessed to nothing in my
face.

Justine Caron was lost in the scene before us. She had, I fancy,
scarcely heard half that had been said. Roscoe said to her presently:
"You like it, do you not?"

"Like it?" she said. "I never saw anything so wonderful."

"And yet it would not be so wonderful without humanity there," rejoined
Mrs. Falchion. "Nature is never complete without man. All that would be
splendid without the mills and the machinery and Boldrick's cable, but
it would not be perfect: it needs man--Phil Boldrick and Company in
the foreground. Nature is not happy by itself: it is only brooding and
sorrowful. You remember the mountain of Talili in Samoa, Mr. Roscoe, and
the valley about it: how entra