"Only one of them, so far as I know, ever returned to Iriatai--Turia, the chief's daughter, a girl of eleven or twelve when she was carried off aboard the man-of-war. Her beauty and intelligence attracted the notice of a half-caste Tahitian, who adopted her and gave her an education at the Sisters' School. At seventeen she married the Baron von Tesmar--an Austrian nobleman, a man of wealth and taste, brought up among the capitals of the Old World. He was well known in all the outlandish ports of the Pacific; for reasons of his own, of which he never spoke, he had chosen to shut the door on the past. He traveled on his own yacht with a Kanaka crew, and during a visit to Tahiti he ran across Turia, the girl from Iriatai. A month later she sailed away with him, with a marriage certificate, all legal and shipshape, stowed away in her camphorwood box. I suppose she must have been the Baroness von Tesmar--By Jove, a funny world! "The natives have a quality I like: each one of them loves his own island in a way that we can scarcely understand. Turia was no exception, but unlike the rest of her people, she ended her days on Iriatai. A short time after he married her the Baron became interested in pearl-culture and--at her suggestion, no doubt--they settled on the island where her savage forefathers had lived and died. "To give you an understanding of the story from now on, I must tell you one or two things about pearl-shell, which furnishes the mother-of-pearl used all over the world for buttons and ornaments and the handles of knives. In the Paumotus where I trade, the pearl-oysters are of a kind called 'black-lipped,' valuable as mother-of-pearl but rather barren so far as real pearls are concerned. Out to the west, about Celebes and in the Sulu Sea, there is another variety, richer in pearls and far more valuable as shell, called 'gold-lipped,' because the edges of the shell are golden-tinted. Von Tesmar was a man of some scientific attainments, and he suspected, far ahead of his time, that the growth of a pearl in the oyster was caused by a parasite, which it might be possible to transmit by artificial means. In order to carry out his experiments, he had his schooner fitted with a kind of well, through which the sea water was allowed to circulate, and brought shipments of live oysters from distant parts, to be transplanted in Iriatai Lagoon. He may have had an idea that the gold-lipped oysters, in this new environment, would prove more susceptible to infection--to the little-known parasite believed to cause the pearl.