“Nay, but listen, Kesta. Such a woman as this one never have I seen. Her skin is white and gleaming as the inside of the pearl-shell. How comes it, my white man, that such a fair woman as this marrieth so mean-looking a man? Was she a slave? Were she a woman of Ponapé, and of good blood, Nanakin the Great would take her to wife.”
“Aye,” said Chester lazily; “and whence came she and her husband?”
“From Kusaie (Strong's Island), where for two years have they lived, so that now the woman speaketh our tongue as well as thee.”
“Ha!” said the trader quickly; “what are their names?”
She told him, and Chester suddenly felt uncomfortable.
Two years before, when spending a few idle months in Honolulu, he had met that white woman. She was waiting to be married to the Rev. Obadiah Yowlman, a hard-faced, earnest-minded, little Yankee missionary, who was coming up from the Carolines in the Planet. There had been some rather heavy love-passages between her and Chester. He preserved his mental equilibrium—she lost hers. The passionate outburst of the “little she missionary,” as he called her when he bade her goodbye, he regarded as the natural and consistent corollary of moonlit nights beneath the waving palms on white Hawaiian beaches. When he returned to Ponapé he simply forgot all about her—and Tulpé never asked him inconsiderate questions about other women whom he might have met during the six months he was away from her. He had come back—that was all she cared for.
“I wonder how Tulpe would take it if she knew?” he thought. “She might turn out a bit of a tiger.”
“What are thy thoughts, Kesta?” And Tulpé came over to him and leant upon his shoulder. “Is it in thy mind to see and talk with the new missionary and his wife?”