"Pélé's uneasy again, my niece," the old man would murmur often as he entered. "I never knew the crater more disturbed. Pélé is angry. She will flood Hawaii. She will drown the people. We must try to quiet her."
Kea looked down always when he spoke like that with a guilty look upon her poor young face. I understood that look. I knew she considered she had cheated the goddess by rescuing me from the flames, and I grieved to think that I should cause her unhappiness.
"Kea," I said to her one day, as she sat still sewing away at a pure white dress in the room by my side, "do you know anything of your English relations—your father's people?"
Kea burst suddenly into a flood of tears. "I wish I did!" she cried earnestly. "I wish I could go to them. I wish I could get away from Hawaii for ever. I'm tired of this terrible, terrible island. It wears my heart out." And she flung away the dress from her in an agony of horror, and fled from the room, still crying bitterly.
"I see what it is," I said to myself pityingly. "They want to marry that helpless young girl to somebody or other she doesn't like. Probably a fat old native with a good thing in cocoa-nuts and sugar-plantations. Poor child! I can easily understand her feelings. She, an English girl almost, in blood and sentiment, to be tied to some wretched old Hawaiian ex-cannibal—some creature incapable of appreciating or sympathizing with her! I don't wonder she shrinks from the horrid prospect. She's a great deal too good and too sweet for any of them."
I may mention however, to prevent misconception, that I was not myself the least little bit in the world in love with Kea. I merely regarded her from a brotherly point of view, with friendship and gratitude. The fact is, a certain young lady in a remote English country rectory, who received a letter from me by every Honolulu mail regularly, might have had just ground of complaint against me had I harboured any trace of such a feeling in my heart towards the gentle little Hawaiian maiden. It was the thought of that particular English lady that caused me so much agony as I lay on the floor of Mauna Loa that awful morning. Nothing else could have made me cling to the last chance of life with so fierce a clinging. For my own part, as a man of science, I have rather a contempt for any fellow who will not willingly risk his own neck, under ordinary circumstances, for any great or noble cause on which he may be occupied: and among such great and noble causes I venture to hold the pursuit of truth and natural knowledge by no means inferior to the pursuit of liberty or of material welfare. But when there's a lady in the case—why, then, of course, the case is altered. A man must then, to some extent, consult his own personal safety. His life is not entirely his own to lose: he has mortgaged it as it were on behalf of another. This however is a pure digression, for which I must apologize, on the ground that it is needful to prevent misapprehension of the relation in which I stood to Kea. Forgive me for thus for a moment dragging in my own private and domestic feelings.
In a few minutes Kea returned again. She had an envelope with a name and address on it in her hand. She gave it to me simply. Her eyes were still red with crying. "That's where my father's people live," she said quietly. "I wish I was with them. My father wanted me to return to them when he died. But I was afraid to go, because—because, though they asked me after his death, they never wrote to me while he was alive—they never wrote to him either—They were angry with him for marrying my mother."
She said it with infinite tenderness and regret. I glanced at the address Kea had given me, and saw to my surprise the name of her father's brother, he was a clergyman in Kent, well known, as it happened, to my own family in England.
"I wish you could go to them, Kea," I cried earnestly. "Whatever they think and feel now, they couldn't help liking you and loving you when they saw you. I wish you could get away from this dreadful Hawaii!"
"I wish I could," Kea answered in a hopeless voice. "But—" she paused for a moment. "I must stop here now; I must stop here—till my marriage!"