"Not a prison," I replied. "The government has built cottages for
them in a little valley. Don't you think it wise to segregate them?"

She did not reply, and I rode away.

A week later I met her one evening at Otupoto, that dividing place
between the valleys of Taaoa and Atuona, where Kahuiti and his
fellow warriors had trapped the human meat. I had walked there to
sit on the edge of the precipice and watch the sun set in the sea.
She came on horseback from her home toward the village, to spend
Sunday with the nuns. She got off her horse when she saw me, and lit
a cigarette.

"What do you do here all alone?" she asked in French. She never used
a word of Marquesan to me. I replied that I was trying to imagine
myself there fifty years earlier, when the meddlesome white sang
very low in the concert of the island powers.

"The people were happier then, I suppose," she said meditatively, as
she handed me her burning cigarette in the courteous way of her
mother's people. "But it does not attract me. I would like to see
the world I read of."

She sat beside me on the rock, her delicately-modeled chin on her
pink palm, and gazed at the colors fading from vivid gold and rose
to yellow and mauve on the sky and the sea. The quietness of the
scene, the gathering twilight, perhaps, too, something in the fact
that I was a white man and a stranger, broke down her reserve.