"Ah—!" breathed Miss Matilda, who did indeed begin to see.
He laid a hand on her arm and gave way at last to a paternal quaver. "Matilda, my child—for you are still a child in many things—I have taken anxious thought for you of late. Very anxious thought. You must trust me, my dear. Trust me to do the best for your welfare—and happiness too—as always. Good night!"...
He left her a dry kiss and a fervent blessing and they parted; the pastor to write a particularly hopeful mission report, and this child of his—who was, by the way, twenty-nine years old—to keep a last tryst with a lawless and forbidden love. She knew it must be the last. For the previous one, two nights before, had been held in the porch of the chapel—in that same dark porch so benevolently, so deceitfully endowed by Captain Hull Gregson....
A Rex Ingram—Metro Picture.
Where the Pavement Ends.
A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.
Her own room opened directly on the veranda. She paused only long enough to snatch up a shawl, as she passed through to the far side of the house. Here she could be safe from hostile ears where the mountain torrent ran thundering; safe from prying eyes in the velvet shadows of the passion-vine.
She parted the leaves and harkened. A soft, thin trilling came up to her from the edge of the guava jungle in the ravine, a mere silver thread of melody against the stream's broad clamor. And then as she leaned farther out, so that her face showed for a moment like a pale blossom in the trellis, Motauri came. He came drifting through the moonlight with a wreath of green about his head, a flower chain over his broad, bare shoulders, clad only in a kilted white pareu—the very spirit of youth and strength and joyous, untrammeled freedom, stepped down from the days when Faunus himself walked abroad.
"Hokoolele!" he called gently, and smiled up toward her, the most splendid figure of a man her eyes had ever beheld. "Star" was his name for her, though indeed she was a very wan and shrinking one, and so to lend her courage he sang the crooning native love-song that runs somewhat like this:
"Bosom, here is love for you,
O bosom, cool as night!
How you refresh me as with dew,
Your coolness gives delight!
"Rain is cold upon the hill
And water in the pool;
But, oh, my heart is yearning still
For you, O bosom cool!"