Ah, beautiful and brave baroness!  I often thought of you during those months in the Annexe.  You will come again, you say, to Tahiti, bathe again in its witching waters, and let the spell of its sweetness bind you again to its soil.  Maybe, but baroness, you will never again be as you were, flinging all body and soul into the fire of passion, and yearning for motherhood!  Such times can never be the same.  We burn, even desire, and consume our dreams.  Child of aristocracy, you found in this South Sea eyot the freedom your atavism, or shall I say, naturalness, craved, and you drank your cup to the lees and thought it good.  I shall not be the one to point a finger at you, nor even to think too vivid the scarlet of my toilet set.  That flamboyant outside my window, once yours, is as garish, and yet lacks no consonance with all about it.

The scene from my veranda was a changing picture of radiance and shadow.  Directly below was the Broom Road.  Umbrageous flamboyants—­the royal poincianas, or flame-trees—­sheltered the short stretch of sward to the water, and their blossoms made a red-gold litter upon the grass.  A giant acacia whose flowers were reddish pink and looked like thistle blooms, protected two canoes, one my own and one Afa’s.  The Annexe was bounded by the Broom Road and the rue de Bougainville, and across that street was the restaurant of Mme. Fanny.  It was built over a tiny stream, which emptied fifty feet away into the lagoon.  A clump of banana-trees hid the patrons, but did not obscure their view from Fanny’s balcony.

In the lagoon, a thousand yards from me, was Motu Uta, a tiny island ringed with golden sand, a mass of green trees half disclosing a gray house.  Motu Uta was a gem incomparable in its beauty and its setting.  It had been the place of revels of old kings and chiefs, and Pomare the Fourth had made it his residence.  Cut off by half a mile of water from Papeete, it had an isolation, yet propinquity, which would have persuaded me to make it my home were I a governor; but it was given over to quarantine purposes, with an old caretaker who came and went in a commonplace rowboat.

The Annexe housed many rats.  I brought to my rooms a basket of bananas, and put it on a table by my bed, the canopied four-poster in which the son of the baroness was born.  In the night I was awakened by a tremendous thump on the floor and a curious dragging noise.  I listened breathlessly.  But the rat must have heard me, for he ceased operations, only returning when he thought I was asleep.  He leaped on the table, scratched a banana from the basket, threw it to the floor, and pulled it to his den near the wardrobe.  The joists and floor boards were eaten away by the ants, and in one hole six or seven inches long this rat had entrance to his den between the floor and the ceiling of the room below.  He had trading proclivities, and in exchange brought me old and valueless trifles.  I once knew a miner