“Seven or eight leper that man support,” said Lovaina to me.  “They die for him, he so good to them.  He help everybodee.  He give them leper the Bible, and sometime he go read them.”

It would be the Song of Solomon he would read to Ruine.  She had red hair, red black or black red, a not unusual color in Tahiti, and her eyes had a glint of red in their brown.  She was exquisite in her silken peignoir, a wreath of scarlet hibiscus-flowers on her head, and a string of gorgeous baroque pearls about her rounded neck.

My room at the Tiare was in the upper story of an old house that sat alone in the back garden, among the domestics, automobiles, carriages, horses, pigs, and fowls.  The house had wide verandas all about it, and the stairway outside.  A few nights after I had arrived in Tahiti I was writing letters on the piazza, the length of the room away from the stairs.  I had a lamp on my table, and the noise of my type-writer hushed the sounds of any one entering the apartment.  It was about ten o’clock, and between sentences I looked at the night.  The stars were in coruscating masses, the riches of the heavens disclosed as only at such a cloudless hour in this southern hemisphere, the Milky Way showing ten thousand gleaming members of the galaxy that are hidden in our skies.  I thought of those happy mariners who first sailed their small, wooden ships into these mysterious seas, and first of our race, saw this strangely brilliant macrocosm, and appreciated it for its marvels and its differences from their own bleaker, Western vault.

There were no doors in the openings into my room from the verandas, but hangings of gorgeous scarlet calico, pareus, kept out the blazing sun, and lent a little privacy at night.  All the furniture was a chair, a dressing-table, and two large beds, canopied with mosquito-nets, evidently provided for a double lodging if needed.

As I finished my letters twenty feet away, a Tahitian girl parted the farther curtain nearest the stairway, and slipped into the room with the silence of the accustomed barefooted.  Imagine her in her gayest gown of rose color, a garland of hinano-flowers on her glossy head, her tawny hair in two plaits to her unconfined waist, and her eyes shining with the spirit of her quest!

She looked through the room to where I sat in the semi-obscurity, and then knelt down by the first bed, and waited.  I gazed again at the starry heavens, and, stepping over the threshold, entered the chamber, lamp in hand.  I undressed leisurely, and putting about me the pareu Lovaina had given me, I threw the light upon the two beds to make my nightly choice.  I surveyed them both critically, but the one nearest to me having the netting arranged for entrance, I selected it, and setting the lamp upon the dresser, extinguished it, groped to the bed in darkness, and lay down upon the coverless sheet.  A few minutes I stayed awake going over the happenings of the day, and fell asleep in joyful mood that I was in the island I had sought so long in desire and dream.  I knew nothing of my visitor, for she had made no audible sound, and the shadows had hidden her.