he struck me."

*****

Long before daylight, Prout, with his face and shoulders covered with
gory stains, staggered into the native village at Maunahoehoe and asked
the people to lend him a horse to take him back to Kalahua.

When within half a mile of Kalahua, almost fainting from loss of blood
and exhaustion, he pulled up his horse at a hut on the borders of the
estate and got off. There were some five or six natives inside, and
they started up with quick expressions of sympathy when they saw his
condition.

"Give me a weapon, O friends," he said. "Some man hath tried to kill
me."

A short squat native smiled grimly, reached to the rafters of the
dwelling, and took down a heavy carbine, which he loaded and then handed
to the white man.

"'Tis Moreno who hath hurt thee," said the native; "at midnight he rode
by here in hot haste."

With the native supporting him, Prout rode along the road to the Estate
gates.

As he reeled through he heard a faint cry.

In another minute he was on the verandah and looking through the French
lights into Marie's dimly-lighted bedroom. An inarticulate cry of
anguish burst from him. Sherard and his wife were together.

Steadying himself against a post he took aim at the trembling figure of
his wife, and fired. She threw up her arms and fell upon her face, and
then Sherard, pistol in hand, dashed out and met him.

Ere he could draw the trigger, Prout swung the heavy weapon round, and
the stock crashed into the traitor's brain.

"It is the death of a dog," said the native, spurning the body with his
naked foot.

She was dying fast when Prout, with love and hate struggling for mastery
in his frenzied brain, stood over her.

"He took my child away from me," she said.... "He said he would kill her
before me,... and it was to save her. Only for that I would have died
first. Oh, Ned, Ned----"

Then with a look of unutterable love from her fast-dimming eyes, she
closed them in death.

*****

That was why Prout, after two years of madness in a prison, had stepped
on board Hetherington's schooner and asked the captain to take him away
somewhere--he cared not where--so that he could be away from the ken of
civilised and cruel mankind and try and forget the dreadful past.

IV.

They are a merry-hearted, laughter-loving race, the people of
white-beached Nukutavau, with whom the trader lived. To them the
grave-faced, taciturn man, who cared not to listen to their songs or