He moved again toward the door, and this time Paul Veniza stepped aside, but, following, stood bareheaded in the doorway as the other clambered to his perch on the hansom cab. Hawkins slapped his reins on the roof of the cab. The horse started slowly forward. The drizzle had ceased; but the horse, left to his own initiative, was still wary of the wet pavements and moved at no greater pace than a walk. Hawkins drove with his coat collar still turned up and his chin on his breast. And horse and man went aimlessly from street to street--and the night grew late. And the cabman's hand reached tentatively, hesitantly, a great many times, toward a bulge in his coat pocket, and for a great many times was withdrawn as empty as it had set forth. And then, once, his fingers touched a glass bottle neck... and then, not his fingers, but his lips... and for a great many times. It had begun to rain again. The horse, as if conscious of the futility of its own movements, had stopped, and, with head hanging, seemed to cower down as though seeking even the slender protection of the shafts, whose ends now made half circles above his ears. Something slipped from the cabman's fingers and fell with a crash to the pavement. The cabman leaned out from his perch and stared down at the shattered glass. “Broken,” said the cabman vacantly. TWENTY YEARS LATER |IT was silver light. Inside the reefs the water lay placid and still, mirroring in a long, shimmering line the reflection of the full tropic moon; beyond, ever and anon, it splashed against its coral barriers in little crystal showers. It was a soundless night. No breeze stirred the palms that, fringing white stretches of beach around the bay, stood out in serene beauty, their irregular tops etched with divine artistry into the sky-line of the night. Out from the shore, in that harbor which holds no sanctuary in storm, the mail boat, dark save for her riding lights, swung at her moorings; shoreward, the perspective altered in the moonlight until it seemed that Mount Vaea had lowered its sturdy head that it might hover in closer guardianship over the little town, Apia straggled in white patches along the road. And from these white patches, which were dwellings and stores, there issued no light. From a point on the shore nearest the mail boat, a figure in cotton drawers and undershirt slipped silently into the water and disappeared. Thereafter, at intervals, a slight ripple disturbed the surface as the man, coming up to breathe, turned upon his back and lay with his face exposed; for the rest he swam under water. It was as though he were in his natural element. He swam superbly even where, there in the Islands, all the natives were born to the sea; but his face, when visible on the few occasions that it floated above the surface, was the face, not of a native, but of a white man.