She wore a black lace gown, clinging, and becoming her slender figure and delicately charming face.  Her features were exquisite, her eyes lustrous black pools of passion, her mouth a scarlet line of pride and disdain.  A large leghorn hat of fine black straw, with chiffon, was on her graceful head, and her tiny feet were in silk stockings and patent leather.  She held a gold and ivory prayer-book in gloved hands, and a jeweled watch hung upon her breast.

She might have passed for a Creole or for one of those beautiful Filipino mestizas, daughters of Spanish fathers and Filipino mothers.  I suppose coquetry in woman was born with the fig-leaf.  This dainty, fetching heiress, born of a French father and a savage mother, had all the airs and graces of a ballroom belle.  Where had she gained these fashions and desires of the women of cities, of Europe?

I had but to look over the church to feel her loneliness.  Teata, Many Daughters, Weaver of Mats, and Flower, savagely handsome, gaudily dressed, were the only companions of her own age.  Flower, of the red-gold hair, was striking in a scarlet gown of sateen, a wreath of pink peppers, and a necklace of brass.  She had been ornamented by the oarsmen of the Jeanne d’Arc, fortunately without Pere Victorien’s knowledge.  Teata, in her tight gown with its insertions of fishnet revealing her smooth, tawny skin, a red scarf about her waist, straw hat trimmed with a bright blue Chinese shawl perched on her high-piled hair, was still a picture of primitive and savage grace.  They were handsome, these girls, but they were wild flowers.  Mlle. N——­ had the poise and delicacy of the hothouse blossom.

Her father had spent thirty years on Hiva-oa, laboring to wring a fortune from the toil of the natives, and dying, he had left it all to this daughter, who, with her laces and jewels, her elegant, slim form and haughty manner, was in this wild abode of barefooted, half-naked people like a pearl in a gutter.  She was free now to do what she liked with herself and her fortune.  What would she do?

It was the question on every tongue and in every eye when, after mass, she passed down the lane respectfully widened for her in the throng on the steps and with a black-garbed sister at her side, walked to the nuns’ house.

“If only she had a religious vocation,” sighed Sister Serapoline.  “That would solve all difficulties, and save her soul and happiness.”

Vainly the nuns and priests had tried during the dozen years of her tutelage in their hands to direct her aspirations toward this goal, but one had only to look into her burning eyes or see the supple movement of her body, to know that she sought her joy on earth.

Liha-Liha, the natives called her father, which means corporal, and that they had hated and yet feared him when Hiva-oa was still given over to cannibalism outlined his character.  He had lived and died in his house near the Stinking Springs on the road to Taaoa.  The sole white man in that valley, he had lorded it over the natives more sternly than had their old chiefs.  He had fought down the wilderness, planted great cocoanut-plantations, forced the unwilling islanders to work for him, and dollar by dollar, with an iron will, he had wrung from their labor the fortune now left in the dainty hands of his half-savage daughter.