ow
Ethel."

"I'll come with pleasure."

"Sunday afternoon's the best time."

Brevald's bungalow, shabby and bedraggled, stood among the coconut trees
of the plantation, a little away from the main road that ran up to
Vailima. Immediately around it grew huge plantains. With their tattered
leaves they had the tragic beauty of a lovely woman in rags. Everything
was slovenly and neglected. Little black pigs, thin and high-backed,
rooted about, and chickens clucked noisily as they picked at the refuse
scattered here and there. Three or four natives were lounging about the
verandah. When Lawson asked for Brevald the old man's cracked voice
called out to him, and he found him in the sitting-room smoking an old
briar pipe.

"Sit down and make yerself at home," he said. "Ethel's just titivating."

She came in. She wore a blouse and skirt and her hair was done in the
European fashion. Although she had not the wild, timid grace of the girl
who came down every evening to the pool, she seemed now more usual and
consequently more approachable. She shook hands with Lawson. It was the
first time he had touched her hand.

"I hope you'll have a cup of tea with us," she said.

He knew she had been at a mission school, and he was amused, and at the
same time touched, by the company manners she was putting on for his
benefit. Tea was already set out on the table and in a minute old
Brevald's fourth wife brought in the tea-pot. She was a handsome native,
no longer very young, and she spoke but a few words of English. She
smiled and smiled. Tea was rather a solemn meal, with a great deal of
bread and butter and a variety of very sweet cakes, and the conversation
was formal. Then a wrinkled old woman came in softly.

"That's Ethel's granny," said old Brevald, noisily spitting on the
floor.

She sat on the edge of a chair, uncomfortably, so that you saw it was
unusual for her and she would have been more at ease on the ground, and
remained silently staring at Lawson with fixed, shining eyes. In the
kitchen behind the bungalow someone began to play the concertina and two
or three voices were raised in a hymn. But they sang for the pleasure of
the sounds rather than from piety.

When Lawson walked back to the hotel he was strangely happy. He was
touched by the higgledy-piggledy way in which those people lived; and in
the smiling good-nature of Mrs Brevald, in the little Norwegian's
fantastic career, and in the shining mysterious eyes