“I was only teasing you.  Honest Injun.  And if you don’t laugh I’ll suspect you of being in a temper with me.  That’s right, laugh.  But don’t—­” she added in alarm, “don’t if it hurts you.  You look as though you had a toothache.  There, there—­don’t say it.  You know you promised not to quarrel, while I have the privilege of going on being as hateful as I please.  And to begin with, there’s the Flibberty-Gibbet.  I didn’t know she was so large a cutter; but she’s in disgraceful condition.  Her rigging is something queer, and the next sharp squall will bring her head-gear all about the shop.  I watched Noa Noah’s face as we sailed past.  He didn’t say anything.  He just sneered.  And I don’t blame him.”

“Her skipper’s rotten bad with fever,” Sheldon explained.  “And he had to drop his mate off to take hold of things at Ugi—­that’s where I lost Oscar, my trader.  And you know what sort of sailors the niggers are.”

She nodded her head judicially, and while she seemed to debate a weighty judgment he asked for a second helping of tinned beef—­not because he was hungry, but because he wanted to watch her slim, firm fingers, naked of jewels and banded metals, while his eyes pleasured in the swell of the forearm, appearing from under the sleeve and losing identity in the smooth, round wrist undisfigured by the netted veins that come to youth when youth is gone.  The fingers were brown with tan and looked exceedingly boyish.  Then, and without effort, the concept came to him.  Yes, that was it.  He had stumbled upon the clue to her tantalizing personality.  Her fingers, sunburned and boyish, told the story.  No wonder she had exasperated him so frequently.  He had tried to treat with her as a woman, when she was not a woman.  She was a mere girl—­and a boyish girl at that—­with sunburned fingers that delighted in doing what boys’ fingers did; with a body and muscles that liked swimming and violent endeavour of all sorts; with a mind that was daring, but that dared no farther than boys’ adventures, and that delighted in rifles and revolvers, Stetson hats, and a sexless camaraderie with men.

Somehow, as he pondered and watched her, it seemed as if he sat in church at home listening to the choir-boys chanting.  She reminded him of those boys, or their voices, rather.  The same sexless quality was there.  In the body of her she was woman; in the mind of her she had not grown up.  She had not been exposed to ripening influences of that sort.  She had had no mother.  Von, her father, native servants, and rough island life had constituted her training.  Horses and rifles had been her toys, camp and trail her nursery.  From what she had told him, her seminary days had been an exile, devoted to study and to ceaseless longing for the wild riding and swimming of Hawaii.  A boy’s training, and a boy’s point of view!  That explained her chafe at petticoats, her revolt at what was only decently conventional.  Some day she would grow up, but as yet she was only in the process.