er's house, and paid homage afar off by sitting down on the
mats in the furthest corner of the house, while fat, greasy Lepeka,{*}
the wife of the equally fat and greasy teacher Paulo, Christianly
whispered in the ears of the holy white ladies that that was the white
man's 'woman'--who wasn't married to her 'husband.' And even a white
missionary's wife must not offend the spouse of the native teacher. So
had any of these ladies wished to talk to Melanie, they would have had
to make Lepeka their medium; for in some parts of the South Seas the
usual position of vicar and curate is reversed, and the white visiting
missionary and his wife deliver themselves into the hands of the brown
curate and his wife for the time being. Perhaps it is this that makes
most white missionaries so thin--the strain of having to submit to a
Kanaka teacher's ideas of conventionality must be pretty hard to
bear. And so poor Melanie, who would have liked to have sat near the
fair-faced, sweet-voiced white ladies, or, perhaps, fondled their hands,
as did the young unmarried girls who always surrounded them, bore her
lot with content. For once, when she had brought her simple _alofa_
(gift of love) to the missionaries, and laid it timidly down on the mats
in the centre of the room, one of the white ladies had smiled at her and
said to her husband,--

'Oh, what a pretty girl, and how nicely she is dressed. Ask her to come
here and sit by me.'

* Rebecca.

But Melanie was quick to see Lepeka's dark frown, and discreetly retired
to her usual corner, at the back of the room, and when she went home to
Masters, she did not chatter and laugh as usual when telling him of all
she had seen and heard at the teacher's house.

For, in her simple heart, there began to grow an unrest. She would feel
better, she thought, when the mission ship had sailed away again, and
she would forget the kind smile of the missionary's wife, and forget,
too, the sneering curl of Lepeka's fat lips. Three years before, when
Tom Masters had picked her up in a dancing saloon in Apia and had asked
her to come away with him to Fana 'alu as his wife, she had thought of
a marriage in the church, with its attendant mild excitements, and
gluttonies of baked pig and fowls, and _palusami_ and other delicacies,
and the receiving and giving of many presents. But when Masters--who
possessed a fragmentary conscience--told her why he could not marry her,
she accepted the position calmly,