He asked to see her. Oh, certainly; before purchasing he should see her. But meanwhile there was the official cheer to taste--_kava_, above all, inimitably mixed--and she should be fetched. Where was she? A young slave girl suggested sardonically that she was probably at her toilet. Since she had heard of the white man’s coming--Saxe had tactfully sent a runner ahead of him--she had been smearing herself meticulously with ochre and other precious pigments. This was said with a sidelong glance at the chief: obviously, he distributed those precious pigments only to his favorites. Saxe said that from that moment his heart misgave him. He had been somehow sure that this woman was Mary. Why his heart should have misgiven him, I do not know; or what devil of stupidity put it into his head that this was the trick of a half-breed slave to make herself irresistible to a white man. It sounded to him, he said, like the inspiration that would naturally occur to the daughter of an Arab by a Mandingo woman. It has never sounded to me in the least like that. He said that he still believed it was Mary; but I fancy he believed it after the fashion of the doubter who shouts his creed a little louder. Of course there was something preposterous in the idea of Mary Bradford’s making herself barbarically _chic_ with ochre to greet the lover who might be coming to rescue her. But was not the whole thing preposterous to the point of incredibility? And Mary Bradford was not an ordinary woman--not the yellow widow of a Portuguese pearl-fisher. It has always seemed to me that poor Saxe ought to have realized that. Saxe consumed _kava_ until he could consume no more. Then the slave girl announced that the woman had been found. Saxe rose to his feet. He was stifling in the great hut, where all the chief councillors had joined them at their feast, where the reek from greased bodies seemed to mount visibly into the twilight of the great conical roof. His head was reeling, and his heart was beating weakly, crazily, against his ribs--“as if it wanted to come out,” he said. His hands were ice-cold. He had just presence of mind enough to drag the black interpreter out with him, and to leave one of his own men inside to watch the stuff with which he proposed to pay. The chief and most of his councillors remained within.