Roscoe smiled enigmatically. “Men do not steal up here: that is the unpardonable crime; any other may occur and go unpunished; not it.” The thought seemed to strike Mrs. Falchion. “I might have known!” she said. “It is the same in the South Seas among the natives--Samoans, Tongans, Fijians, and others. You can--as you know, Mr. Roscoe,”--her voice had a subterranean meaning,--“travel from end to end of those places, and, until the white man corrupts them, never meet with a case of stealing; you will find them moral too in other ways until the white man corrupts them. But sometimes the white man pays for it in the end.” Her last words were said with a kind of dreaminess, as though they had no purpose; but though she sat now idly looking into the valley beneath, I could see that her eyes had a peculiar glance, which was presently turned on Roscoe, then withdrawn again. On him the effect was so far disturbing that he became a little pale, but I noticed that he met her glance unflinchingly and then looked at me, as if to see in how far I had been affected by her speech. I think I confessed to nothing in my face. Justine Caron was lost in the scene before us. She had, I fancy, scarcely heard half that had been said. Roscoe said to her presently: “You like it, do you not?” “Like it?” she said. “I never saw anything so wonderful.” “And yet it would not be so wonderful without humanity there,” rejoined Mrs. Falchion. “Nature is never complete without man. All that would be splendid without the mills and the machinery and Boldrick’s cable, but it would not be perfect: it needs man--Phil Boldrick and Company in the foreground. Nature is not happy by itself: it is only brooding and sorrowful. You remember the mountain of Talili in Samoa, Mr. Roscoe, and the valley about it: how entrancing yet how melancholy it is. It always seems to be haunted, for the natives never live in the valley. There is a tradition that once one of the white gods came down from heaven, and built an altar, and sacrificed a Samoan girl--though no one ever knew quite why: for there the tradition ends.” I felt again that there was a hidden meaning in her words; but Roscoe remained perfectly still. It seemed to me that I was little by little getting the threads of his story. That there was a native girl; that the girl had died or been killed; that Roscoe was in some way--innocently I dared hope--connected with it; and that Mrs. Falchion held the key to the mystery, I was certain. That it was in her mind to use the mystery, I was also certain. But for what end I could not tell. What had passed between them in London the previous winter I did not know: but it seemed evident that she had influenced him there as she did on the ‘Fulvia’, had again lost her influence, and was now resenting the loss, out of pique or anger, or because she really cared for him. It might be that she cared.