ret rebellion,
taking it down in long hand during odd hours in the week! Preaching
grandiloquently before a few score natives who understood little
beyond the gestures, for the single purpose of warding off
disintegration! It reminded the doctor of a stubborn retreat; from
barricade to barricade, grimly fighting to keep the enemy at bay,
that insidious enemy of the white man in the South Seas--inertia.

The drunken beachcombers; the one-sided education; the utter
loneliness of a white child without playfellows, human or animal,
without fairy stories, who for days was left alone while the father
visited neighbouring islands, these pictures sank far below their
actual importance. He would always see the picture of the huge,
raw-boned Dutchman, haranguing and thundering the word of God into
the dull ears of South Sea Islanders, who, an hour later, would be
carrying fruit penitently to their wooden images.

He now understood her interest in Taber, as he called himself:
habit, a twice-told tale. A beachcomber in embryo, and she had lent
a hand through habit as much as through pity. The grim mockery of
it!--those South Sea loafers, taking advantage of Enschede's
Christianity and imposing upon him, accepting his money and
medicines and laughing behind his back! No doubt they made the name
a byword and a subject for ribald jest in the waterfront bars. And
this clear-visioned child had comprehended that only half the
rogues were really ill. But Enschede took them as they came,
without question. Charity for the ragtag and the bobtail of the
Seven Seas, and none for his own flesh and blood.

This started a thought moving. There must be something behind the
missioner's actions, something of which the girl knew nothing nor
suspected. It would not be possible otherwise to live in daily
contact with this level-eyed, lovely girl without loving her.
Something with iron resolve the father had kept hidden all these
years in the lonely citadel of his heart. Teaching the word of God
to the recent cannibal, caring for the sick, storming the
strongholds of the plague, adding his own private income to the
pittance allowed him by the Society, and never seeing the angel
that walked at his side! Something the girl knew nothing about;
else Enschede was unbelievable.

It now came to him with an added thrill how well she had told her
story; simply and directly, no skipping, no wandering hither and
yon: from the first hour she could remember, t