th
a flaming torch of dried palm-leaves held high by a brown, tattooed
hand, to dazzle the flying fish that, with wings outspread, floated
motionless upon the surface of the water.

*****

Then, because the child had no playmates, and her little life was almost
as joyless and as solitary as his own, he would wait with her till
the long line of canoes passed by, so that she could see the bronzed,
half-naked figures of the paddlers, and the bright gleam and shimmer of
the fish as they were swept up by the deadly net, and hear the warning
cry from the torch-bearers, as in the depths beneath they saw the black
shadow of a prowling shark rushing to seize the net, or perchance the
outrigger of the canoe, in his cruel, murderous jaws.

Slowly the canoes paddled by, and as they passed, the hum of voices
and laughter and the cheery lilt of island melody died away, and the
paddlers looked shoreward to the motionless figure of Prout, who, with
the child by his side, seemed to heed naught but the wide sweep of ocean
that lay before him.

But though the voices and laughter and snatches of song ceased, many of
the kindly-hearted people would, ere they passed, call out a word or two
of greeting to the white man and his child, and the latter would wave
her hand and smile back, while her father, as if awakened from a dream,
called out, in the island tongue, the customary "May your fishing
to-night be lucky." And then, as the last canoe vanished, and the glare
and the smoke of the torches with it, he, with the little Mercedes by
his side, walked back to his house on the lagoon.

*****

And so, night after night, save in the stormy season of the year, when
the white rain-squalls gathered together on the windward sea-line, and
swept quickly down upon the island and drenched the loose, sandy soil
with pouring showers, the white man had sat with his face turned seaward
to the cloudless horizon of the starlit ocean and his mind dwelling upon
the ever-present memories of the past.

Such, for three years past, ever since he had first landed among the
people of Nukutavau, had been the existence of Prout, the silent,
solitary trader.

*****

II.

Nine years before, Prout, then one of the "smartest" Englishmen in the
Hawaiian Islands, had been manager of the Kalahua sugar plantation on
Maui. Out of his very loneliness in the world--for except his mother,
in a far-away Devonshire village, there was no one in the outside world
t