“‘You don’t think it big enough?’ I was so relieved that I thought I could speak lightly--Heaven forgive my folly! If it was just some little feud of their ambitions, they’d be all right as soon as they were off the land. But her face didn’t relax. “‘He has been offered the chance of exiling himself on Molokai with eight hundred lepers.’ She had brought the jangling tones into a kind of ironic gamut. ‘_That_ is the kingdom he is offered. And he thinks--my God! he wants to go!’ She broke down utterly and wept, great sobs, like a man’s, coming up from her chest and shaking her frail body. Women don’t usually cry that way; there’s trouble in it when they do. “‘But he isn’t going.’ It was only decent to comfort her. ‘You say you are sailing for Europe.’ “Dorrien did not speak. Her sobs slowed gradually. She was making a terrible effort for the power to speak coherently, to get in her arguments, her pleas, her threats. I suppose I was her last dim substitute for public opinion. She was trying to bring the world to bear on him in Soerabaya, and there was only I to be the world. “Now, how could I have known I was going to run into a thing like that, out there on the other edge of Java? Do I look like Mrs. Grundy? She hated me, mind you; she was terribly afraid of me; she couldn’t a bit trust me to see the thing her way; but there was no one else. I was an American, and I had had the bad luck to know Dorrien long before. She wasn’t trying any feminine wiles; she was just pleading for civilization, as she understood it, against mad and monstrous ideas that she hadn’t dreamed existed, except inaccessibly. Caste goes deeper than sex--among us, anyhow. I don’t know what she thought about Dorrien, really. Probably he merely seemed to her, for the moment, to have obliterated deliberately all his caste-marks. I’ve always held that, if a man did the work, it wasn’t up to the woman to tell him how to do it; and I remembered how Dorrien had felt about leprosy. Probably he could do good work there. I fancied he knew what he wanted. Some one had to be at Molokai; why, or why not, Dorrien? “I looked at him. He was sitting perfectly straight and uncomfortable, his mad eyes fixed, as if they were glass, on the palm-boughs out beyond the smoky porch-lamp. Nothing to be done there. And when I turned back to her, I simply--oh, abominably, I grant you--laughed aloud. The notion of expecting a woman like that to live on a leper island! It had been bad enough to see her in Soerabaya. I was sorry, fundamentally and genuinely sorry, for Dorrien; but it ought to have been patent even to him that Mrs. Dorrien couldn’t go to Molokai. Nothing but an exclusive love, the kind we’ve all heard about and never experienced, would have made her do it. She and Dorrien had nothing of that sort to go upon, I was absolutely sure. “‘But you’re sailing.’ I clung to Dorrien’s explicit words.