y of Apia, with its heavy drinking, its gambling and coarse
sensuality, a sick man, trying to resign himself to the loss of the
career which had fired his imagination with ambitious thoughts. He set
behind him resolutely all his hopes of making a great name for himself
and strove to content himself with the few poor months of careful life
which was all that he could count on. He was boarding with a half-caste
trader who had a store a couple of miles along the coast at the edge of
a native village; and one day, wandering aimlessly along the grassy
paths of the coconut groves, he had come upon the hut in which Sally
lived. The beauty of the spot had filled him with a rapture so great
that it was almost painful, and then he had seen Sally. She was the
loveliest creature he had ever seen, and the sadness in those dark,
magnificent eyes of hers affected him strangely. The Kanakas were a
handsome race, and beauty was not rare among them, but it was the beauty
of shapely animals. It was empty. But those tragic eyes were dark with
mystery, and you felt in them the bitter complexity of the groping,
human soul. The trader told him the story and it moved him.

"Do you think he'll ever come back?" asked Neilson.

"No fear. Why, it'll be a couple of years before the ship is paid off,
and by then he'll have forgotten all about her. I bet he was pretty mad
when he woke up and found he'd been shanghaied, and I shouldn't wonder
but he wanted to fight somebody. But he'd got to grin and bear it, and I
guess in a month he was thinking it the best thing that had ever
happened to him that he got away from the island."

But Neilson could not get the story out of his head. Perhaps because he
was sick and weakly, the radiant health of Red appealed to his
imagination. Himself an ugly man, insignificant of appearance, he prized
very highly comeliness in others. He had never been passionately in
love, and certainly he had never been passionately loved. The mutual
attraction of those two young things gave him a singular delight. It had
the ineffable beauty of the Absolute. He went again to the little hut by
the creek. He had a gift for languages and an energetic mind, accustomed
to work, and he had already given much time to the study of the local
tongue. Old habit was strong in him and he was gathering together
material for a paper on the Samoan speech. The old crone who shared the
hut with Sally invited him to come in and sit down. She gave him