Bella sighed and nodded.

"What is wealth after all, Sister Martha? My new Pierce-Arrow came
down on the steamer with me. My third in two years. But oh, all
the Pierce-Arrows and all the incomes in the world compared with a
lover!--the one lover, the one mate, to be married to, to toil
beside and suffer and joy beside, the one male man lover husband .
. . "

Her voice trailed off, and the sisters sat in soft silence while an
ancient crone, staff in hand, twisted, doubled, and shrunken under
a hundred years of living, hobbled across the lawn to them. Her
eyes, withered to scarcely more than peepholes, were sharp as a
mongoose's, and at Bella's feet she first sank down, in pure
Hawaiian mumbling and chanting a toothless mele of Bella and
Bella's ancestry and adding to it an extemporized welcome back to
Hawaii after her absence across the great sea to California. And
while she chanted her mele, the old crone's shrewd fingers lomied
or massaged Bella's silk-stockinged legs from ankle and calf to
knee and thigh.

Both Bella's and Martha's eyes were luminous-moist, as the old
retainer repeated the lomi and the mele to Martha, and as they
talked with her in the ancient tongue and asked the immemorial
questions about her health and age and great-great-grandchildren--
she who had lomied them as babies in the great house at Kilohana,
as her ancestresses had lomied their ancestresses back through the
unnumbered generations. The brief duty visit over, Martha arose
and accompanied her back to the bungalow, putting money into her