did he
seem to perceive that anything unusual had taken place in the time he
had been gone. He drank the bottle of beer and ate the sardines and
biscuit, never troubling himself whence they had come; and while Salesa
waited and waited with a suffocating heart, he looked at dead fish
through bits of glass. But day by day she returned to his camp with the
assiduity of a mother to her nursing child; and by degrees growing
bolder with custom, she no longer watched until Professor No No had
departed, but moved here and there about his land, secure by reason of
his blindness and preoccupation. Like a wild animal to whom one
approaches with gentleness and precaution, thus it was with Professor No
No in the hands of Salesa. First he saw her only at a distance as she
cleaned and swept; then a little closer as she spread his table and laid
out his bottle of beer and the sardines and biscuit; then it came about
that she even touched him with impunity, and sat beside him in a chair
as he continued to look at dead fish through bits of glass. At last she
dared to speak, telling him softly the names of the dead fish, which he
wrote down in a little book, and informing him also that her name was
Salesa, and that she loved him.

And she, so defiant and proud, became as another person; so that she was
kind not only to Professor No No, but to others whom she had previously
treated with contumely. She carried the white man's packages when he
went abroad, his photograph box and all manner of apparatus and tools,
and the bottle of beer and the sardines for his well-being, never
heeding the sun nor the fiery sand. She sat with him daily in his boat,
baiting his hooks and catching fish likewise, and grew wise also in
looking at them through bits of glass, so that he no longer ran at her
and cried, "No, no!" when she touched his things. On the contrary, her
wisdom increased in such matters, becoming in time even as his own, so
that she also took photographs, and hammered off pieces of coral from
the reef, and grew excited over little, common, worthless fish that
stung you if you touched them.

It is not to be supposed that Malamalama watched with any equanimity
this increasing friendship between Professor No No and his wife, or that
the constant tale of scandal and evil-doing fell on heedless ears. He
beat Salesa repeatedly with a stick, and she bit him in return all over
his beautiful body; and their fine house, once the envy of all Uvea,
r