the palings, with a tub of gold-fish by the
wayside, entered casually in. The buildings stand in three groups by
the edge of the beach, where an angry little spitfire sea continually
spirts and thrashes with impotent irascibility, the big seas breaking
further out upon the reef. The first is a small house, with a very large
summer parlour, or _lanai_, as they call it here, roofed, but
practically open. There you will find the lamps burning and the family
sitting about the table, dinner just done: my mother, my wife, Lloyd,
Belle, my wife's daughter, Austin her child, and to-night (by way of
rarity) a guest. All about the walls our South Sea curiosities, war
clubs, idols, pearl shells, stone axes, etc.; and the walls are only a
small part of a lanai, the rest being glazed or latticed windows, or
mere open space. You will see there no sign of the Squire, however; and
being a person of a humane disposition, you will only glance in over the
balcony railing at the merrymakers in the summer parlour, and proceed
further afield after the Exile. You look round, there is beautiful green
turf, many trees of an outlandish sort that drop thorns--look out if
your feet are bare; but I beg your pardon, you have not been long enough
in the South Seas--and many oleanders in full flower. The next group of
buildings is ramshackle, and quite dark; you make out a coach-house
door, and look in--only some cocoanuts; you try round to the left and
come to the sea front, where Venus and the moon are making luminous
tracks on the water, and a great swell rolls and shines on the outer
reef; and here is another door--all these places open from the
outside--and you go in, and find photography, tubs of water, negatives
steeping, a tap, and a chair and an ink-bottle, where my wife is
supposed to write; round a little further, a third door, entering which
you find a picture upon the easel and a table sticky with paints; a
fourth door admits you to a sort of court, where there is a hen
sitting--I believe on a fallacious egg. No sign of the Squire in all
this. But right opposite the studio door you have observed a third
little house, from whose open door lamp-light streams and makes hay of
the strong moonlight shadows. You had supposed it made no part of the
grounds, for a fence runs round it lined with oleander; but as the
Squire is nowhere else, is it not just possible he may be here? It is a
grim little wooden shanty; cobwebs bedeck it; friendly mice in