of wonder.

Obstacles! All his life had been a turning back from small,
insurmountable obstacles. Of a sudden he beheld really vast obstacles
tumbling down, verily at a touch. Here was just one more of them. By a
lucky chance this "Queen Daughter" did not know by whose hand she had
been made thrice a widow; it was the simplest thing to suppose it the
trader, the same big, blond, European man who had presently removed her
"for safety" to the summer house behind the Residence.--And from the
trader, by a gesture of melodramatic violence, the other and slighter
man had set her free.--Perhaps even that would not have intrigued her
essentially barbaric interest as much as it did had it not been for his
amazing attitude of, well, let's say, "refrainment." His almost absurdly
fastidious concern for what the West would call "the sanctity of her
person." You can imagine--to a Marquesan woman! That! She was not ugly!

As her gaze, from the platform, dwelt upon the shrewd, blade-sharp
features of the man beside me, the elementary problem in her eyes seemed
to redouble the peculiar, golden, Aryan beauty of her face. Let me tell
you I am human. Perhaps Signet was human, too. Standing there,
encompassed by the light of that royal and lovely woman's eyes, there
was surely about him a glow--and a glow not altogether, it seemed to me,
of "Smith's nickel and Jones's dime." I could have laughed. I could have
kicked him. The impostor! Even yet I had failed to measure the man.

Back on the veranda again, dinner eaten, and dusk come down, Signet
brought out an old guitar from among the Dutchman's effects (it had
belonged probably to that defunct nephew of the dress clothes), and as
he talked he picked at the thing with idle fingers. Not altogether idle,
though, I began to think. Something began to emerge by and by from the
random fingerings--a rhythm, a tonal theme.--Then I had it, and there
seemed to stand before me again the swarded "high place," with torches
flaring over upturned faces and mounting walls of green. Almost I sensed
again the beat in my blood, the eye-ravishing vision of that gold-brown
flame of motion, that voluptuous priestess.

"Oh, yes. That!" I murmured. "It's got something--something--that
tune.--But how can you remember it?"

"_She_ helps me out. I'm trying to put it in shape."

Indeed, when I left that night and before my oarsmen had got me a
cable's length from the beach I heard the strumming resumed, very
fain