Here was a chance not to be missed. Surely never in this world was there seen a younger pair of missionaries than Master Kenneth Kapaa'a Blair—Kenni-Kenni to the natives—and Miss Alison Kapaa'a Evans—Alivani—when they set out, in their frills and furbelows, to wile the hearts of the brown men and women of the outer islands.
Ha'o and Nai went with them, to add their persuasions and the argument of their presence to the rest, and Aunt Jannet went because she knew something untoward would happen to those babies unless her eye was on them.
Blair knew it would be no easy matter at best, and it was not.
At Kanele, the first island they came to, the largest of the group after Kapaa'a, about thirty miles away, the old chief Maru received them with the heartiest of welcomes, and his old wife and her daughter-in-law and all the other women went into raptures over the blue-eyed babies.
But when the subject of the visit was cautiously broached, the old man stiffened at once with his natural suspicion and declined the invitation on the spot, and nothing they could say would persuade him to it.
They stayed the night, however, and Ha'o had much talk with the old man's son, a bright stalwart fellow over six feet high whose name was Kahili. In the morning Kahili announced his intention of going with the white men. Whereupon loud lamentations from his father and mother and wife and children, who clung to him wherever they could grip, and expressed their intention of anchoring him to his native soil at cost of their lives. He reasoned with them good-humouredly at first, but finally began to get angry at the exhibition, and the more they tried to dissuade him the more determined was he to go.
Then, suddenly, the old chief surprised them all by proposing a bargain. If the white men would leave their grandmother—Aunt Jannet Harvey to wit—as pledge of their honourable intentions, both he and Kahili his son would go in the big ship, and when they returned safe and sound the ship could take the grandmother away.
Blair laughed so much over the old fellow's 'cuteness that he came near to dispelling their suspicions. And the matter being explained to Aunt Jannet, without undue insistence upon the maturity of her new dignity, that good lady, with a somewhat forlorn attempt at nonchalance, accepted the offer on the spot, and said she would stop. And what it cost her no man may venture to say, for she had been looking forward to the christening of Jean's boy as a white stone day in her life.
"It's for the good of the work, Kenneth, so get away with them before I change my mind," said she, bravely enough.
"Oh, Aunt Jannet, I shall miss you so," from Jean, with a suspicion of tears in her voice.