"It is I who am weak," she said, lifting her tear-stained face, and essaying to smile as she drew back the long silken tresses from her brow. "Something seemed at that moment to warn me that I should never live to claim your love. I have often felt it. But, if _your_ life is spared for long years to come, I shall not mourn. No, no! But you will never forget your poor Erena, who loved you--loved, yes, you will never know how much!" As she spoke her last words, she rose to her feet, pressed one lingering, passionate kiss upon his forehead, and was gone. With the dawn the tohunga arrived. This important and mysterious personage, of which one was always to be found in the larger sections of a tribe, combined the offices of priest and sorcerer with the more practical profession of the physician. Unquestionably, his knowledge of simples and general surgery was far from despicable. By incantations and spells, it was thought in the tribe that he had foreknowledge of the death or otherwise of his patients. As a soothsayer he had now used the powerful spell of the "withered twigs." Chanting a _karakia_, with a sudden jerk he broke off from the tree two of equal size and length. The piece he held in his left hand snapped off short. The longer twig remained in his right. "The pakeha will not die," he exclaimed. "My art has saved him. It will be good for the Ngapuhi tribe, and for the maiden Erena, whose mother I so much loved." Arriving at the couch of the stricken pakeha, he looked upon him with solemn and mysterious regard. He felt his pulse, and minutely scrutinized the cicatrice of the newly healed wound. Meanwhile the eyes of the girl, dilated with terror and anxiety, watched his inscrutable countenance, as the mother of the sick child in more conventional abodes fixes her gaze on the physician, whose words contain the issues of life or death. "Speak, O Tiro-hanga! Say whether he will die--and I also. One word will serve for both." The tohunga placed his hand upon the shoulder of the excited girl, whose every nerve seemed quivering, as if the tension of mind and body had exhausted the limit of human endurance. "As you are, so was your mother in her youth," he said, speaking with deep though restrained feeling in the Maori tongue; "in those days when the tall pakeha rangatira came to Hokianga from Maketu--he whose arm was strong as the lancewood of the hillside, and whose counsel was wise in the day of battle. I would have killed him, though my own life was forfeit, had I not seen that _she_ would follow him to the reinga. But I could not cause a hair of her head to be harmed, such was my bondage to her _mana_. And you, O pakeha, will I save, likewise, for her sake. Comfort yourself, O Erena; the pakeha will not die." "Is it so? Truly do you say it?" almost gasped the frenzied maid. "Is there anything more that we can do? Have you the healing medicine for him?"