Her Marquesan blood was speaking in that cry of the heart, unrestrained and passionate.  They are not the cold, chaste women of other climes, these women of the Marquesas; with blood at fever heat and hearts beating like wild things against bars, they listen when love or its counterfeit pours into their ears those soft words with nothing in them that make a song.  They have no barriers of reserve or haughtiness; they make no bargains; they go where the heart goes, careless of certified vows.

“Mon dieu!” Mademoiselle N——­ exclaimed and put her tiny hand to her red lips.  “What if the good sisters heard me?  I am bad.  I know. Eh bien! I am Marquesan after all.”

We were about to cross the stream by my cabin, and I mounted the horse behind her to save a wetting.  She turned impulsively and looked at me, her lovely face close to mine, her dark eyes burning, and her hot breath on my cheek.

“Write to me when you are in Tahiti, and tell me if you think I would be happy there?” she said imploringly.  “I have no friends here, except the nuns.  I need so much to go away.  I am dying here.”

Coming up my trail a few days later, I found on my paepae a shabbily dressed little bag-of-bones of a white man, with a dirty gray beard and a harsh voice like that of Baufre.  He had a note to me from Le Brunnec, introducing M. Lemoal, born in Brest, a naturalized American.  The note was sealed, and I put it carefully away before turning to my visitor.  It read: 

  “CHER CITOYEN: 

“I send you a specimen of the Marquesan beaches, so that you can have a little fun.  This fellow have a very tremendous life.  He is an old sailor, pirate, gold-miner, Chinese-hanger, thief, robber, honest-man, baker, trader; in a word, an interesting type.  With the aid of several glasses of wine I have put him in the mood to talk delightfully.”

A low-browed man was Lemoal, sapped and ruthless, but certainly he had adventured.

Was the Bella Union Theater still there in Frisco?  Did they still fight in Bottle Meyers, and was his friend Tasset on the police force yet?  His memories of San Francisco ante-dated mine.  He had been a hoodlum there, and had helped to hang Chinese.  He had gone to Tahiti in 1870 and made a hundred thousand francs keeping a bakery.  That fortune had lasted him during two years’ tour of the world.

“Now I’m bust,” he said bitterly.  “Now I got no woman, no children, no friends, and I don’t want none.  I am by myself and damn everybody!”

I soothed his misanthropy with two fingers of rum, and he mellowed into advice.

“I saw you with that daughter of Liha-Liha,” he said, using the native name of the dead millionaire.  “You be careful.  One time I baked bread in Taaoa.  My oven was near his plantation.  I saw that girl come into the woods and take off her dress.  She had a mirror to see her back, and I looked, and the sun shone bright.  What she saw, I saw—­a patch of white.  She is a leper, that rich girl.”