gh her heart.

*****

He was sitting at the table with his face clasped in his hands when
'Rita came in. She was smoking her inevitable cigarette, and the thin
wreaths of blue smoke curled upwards from her lips as she leant one arm
on the table and caressed Blackett's ice-cold forehead with her shapely
hand. Suddenly she stooped and sought gently to remove his hands from
his face.

"Harry, are you very ill, old fellow? What can I do for you?"

"Do for me?" and the sudden misery that had smitten his heart looked out
from his pallid face,... "give me back the peace of mind that was mine
ten minutes ago. Leave me to die here of fever--for you I have become a
murderer--a man no better than Hutton. The blood of that poor girl
will for ever be between us." And then she saw that tears were falling
through his trembling fingers.

"Harry," she said, "I thought you were more of a man"--and here her
voice softened--"don't grieve over it. It wasn't your fault,... and I
have been a good little girl to you. Don't be miserable because of
such a little thing as that. If Tubariga hadn't killed her, I daresay I
should have done so myself. She was a sulky little wretch."

*****

I know Blackett well. The horror of that day has never entirely left
him. But for that one dark memory he would have married 'Rita--who
would have most probably run a knife into his ribs later on, when the
influence of her beauty had somewhat waned and he began to look at other
women. The fateful impulse of that moment when he told the chief to
bring back the girl dead or alive wrecked and tortured his mind beyond
description. And he can never forget.

His 'Rita and he left the island soon afterwards to wander away back to
Eastern Polynesia, but his continued fits of melancholy annoyed the girl
so much that she one day quarrelled with and left him, and made a fresh
matrimonial engagement with a man less given to mawkish sentiment.

THE TRADER

I.

The evening fires were lighting up the darkness of the coming night,
when Prout, the only white man on the island, left his house on the edge
of the lagoon, and, with his little daughter running by his side, walked
slowly through the village.

As they passed through the now deserted pathways that intersected the
straggling collection of grey, thatched-roofed houses, and Prout's heavy
step crunched into the broken coral, the natives, gathered together for
their evening meal, looked forth, and t