All these matters took time, and while their hands and hearts were full of them there came to them certain other little matters which filled both hands and hearts to overflowing.
To Kenneth and Jean Blair was born a son, and a month later to Charles and Alison Evans a daughter, and it is doubtful if anything in the history of Kapaa'a had ever stirred the feminine portion of the community to such a pitch of excitement and enthusiasm as did the arrival of these little white strangers.
"Now," said the brown women, with deeper lights in their lustrous eyes, as they gazed admiringly on the little pink-and-white squirmers, "you belong to us indeed, since you have borne children among us."
And every day they made pilgrimages to the two new shrines, and sat worshipfully, while the unconscious little saints performed their morning ablutions and then lay gazing placidly out of their blue eyes at the sights which no one else could see. Those striking blue eyes—the blue of the sky up above—completed the capture of the dark-eyed ones. There were blue eyes in plenty among the grown-up whites, but never were blue eyes like these, and the dark eyes never tired of gazing at them.
Of the rapturous joy of the two mothers, and the deep thankfulness of the fathers, there is no need to speak. For a time the new maternal cares monopolised the former, and the latter went into their island work with new high lights in their faces and with even greater vigour than before.
Aunt Harvey exulted in those babies as though she had had not a little to do with bringing them about, and Mary Stuart gloated over them with blushing cheeks and kindling eyes that told their own hopeful stories.
Every man of the Torch offered his services as nursemaid to carry them about the beach, and the numbers of small brothers and sisters they had all been in the habit of devoting their early years to was simply marvellous.
The christening ceremony—Kenneth Kapaa'a Blair and Alison Kaapa'a Evans—was an occasion of high festival throughout the islands, and Blair, with his life-work always large in his mind, turned it to account. Aunt Harvey was not present at that high ceremony, to her very great regret but more greatly to her honour. And this is how it came about.
Intercourse with the other islands had been constantly maintained by the regular visitations of the Torch and the quondam Blackbird schooner—renamed the Jean Arnot and captained by Jim Gregor, first officer of the Torch; but, compared with what had been done on Kapaa'a, the advances had been small.
Blair had, for a long while past, recognised the fact that the greatest object-lesson he could possibly offer the other chiefs was the sight of what was being done on Kapaa'a. But at the first suggestion of taking them over in the ship to see for themselves, their suspicions were in arms. That was an old trick of the white men's. They had all heard how the brown men were decoyed on board the white men's ships under wonderful promises, and never heard of again. They accepted all he gave them, they listened to all he had to say, but sail away in the big ship they would not.