"The words of your God and mine?"
"Exactly."
"And where, and when, and how?"
"Listen; I have thought of a plan. I don't know what they would do to us or to me if they caught me with the books."
The girl shook her head with grave foreboding.
"They might kill you," she said, "but I don't know. The things of the God--what do you call them?--books, have never been taken from the taboo house."
"Church," he corrected.
"The church," she repeated, endeavoring with considerable success to form the unaccustomed sound. "I can't tell what they would do, but old Kobo would be terribly angry and afraid. They are all afraid of that house, as I was until you showed me a better way. And Hano hates you, anyway."
"Of course. Personally, I don't fear the lot of them," said the man, smiling and quite confident in his splendid vigor, "but I don't want to have any trouble. I don't want to be the means of introducing bloodshed and hatred into this little paradise."
He spoke unwittingly, not realizing for the moment that wherever human passions enter, even the highest and holiest, they usually make a way through which others that come not in the same category follow. His arrival upon the island, the unconscious supremacy he assumed as related to the rest, the love that had sprung up between him and this fair child of Europe, and of the nurture of the tropic seas, had brought jealousy and hate and envy in their train. There had been no crime committed on that island perhaps since it had been discovered, certainly not for generations, but now--well, he would see. He went on in natural unconsciousness of all that while the obsessed woman hung upon his words--