"Good morning, Hira. Where is Henare? You are all alone here?"
"Oh, he is at some road-work," she answered cheerfully, "but he always comes home at night. He gets good wages from the contractor."
"What a nice cottage you have!—weather-boarded, too. Who built it?"
"Oh, Henare and another half-caste chap sawed the boards and put it up. He likes living here better than in the kainga, and so do I. We can go down there when we want to."
"Good-bye, then. I have been showing this pakeha gentleman the pah.—Now, those people are just sufficiently educated to be happy and contented," said Erena. "He is a steady, hard-working fellow, and, as roads are beginning to be made, he is able from his pay to build a cottage and live comfortably."
"Education is a problem. If it leads people to think correctly on the great questions of life, it is—it must be—an advantage; but if, through anything in their condition, it produces envy and discontent, it is an evil, with which the nations have to reckon in the future."
"I sometimes wish I had not been educated myself," she said with a sigh. "I seem to have all manner of tastes and hopes most unlikely to be realized. Whereas——"
And just at that moment the lilt of the girl on the hillside came down to them, joyous with the magic tones of youthful love and hope. It furnished an answer to her questioning of fate, immediately apparent to both.
"Do not doubt for an instant!" exclaimed Massinger, touched to the heart by the girl's saddened look, and realizing the justice of her complaint. "You were never born for such a life. Nature has gifted you with the qualities which women have longed for in all ages. Your day will come—a day of appreciation, fortune, happiness. Who can doubt it that looks on you, that knows you as I do?"