SHE WAS a Tewana of the Tehuantepec Isthmus, a primal woman, round-armed, deep-breasted, shapely as the dream on which Canova modeled Venus. Her skin was of the rich gold hue that marks the blood unmuddied by Spanish strain; to see her, poised on a rich hip by the river's brink, wringing her tresses after the morning bath, it were justifiable to mistake her for some beautiful bronze. Moreover, it were easy to see her, for, in Tehuantepec, innocence is thoughtless as in old Eden. When Paul Steiner passed her one morning, she gave him the curious open-eyed stare of a deer, bade him a pleasant "_Buenos dias, Senor!_" and would have proceeded, undisturbed, with her toilet, but that he spoke. In this he was greatly mistaken. Gringos there are--praise the saints!--who can judge Tehuantepec by the insight of kindred purity, but Paul had to learn by the more uncomfortable method of a stone in the face. He ought not, however, to be too severely handled for his dulness. Though a mining engineer, nature had endowed him with little beyond the algebraic qualities necessary to the profession; a German-American, a dull birth and heredity had predestined him for that class which clothes its morality in fusty black and finds safety in following its neighbor in the cut of its clothes and conduct. As then, he was not planned for original thinking, it is not at all surprising that he should--when pitchforked by Opportunity into the depths of tropical jungles--lose his moral bearings, fail to recognize a virtue that went in her own golden skin, and so go down before a temptation that, of old, populated the sexless desert. That his error continued in the face of Andrea's stone is certainly more remarkable, though this also should be charged rather against her mismarksmanship than to the wearing quality of his electro-plate morality. It is doubtful if even the ancient Jews had found "stoning" as efficacious a "cure for souls" had they thrown wide as she. Anyway, Paul stood "unconvicted," as the revivalists have it, and being moved to chagrin instead of shame, he carried the story of Andrea's surprising modesty to Bachelder.