Paris. But that is neither here nor there as regards the present story.

I had ascertained that Allen's train was to arrive from Brisbane at ten in the morning, and that he was to be taken directly from the station to the Town Hall to receive the "Freedom of the City." Then, out of consideration for the fact "that the hero" (as the Herald had it) was "still far from recovered from the terrible hardships he had endured as a consequence of his unparalleled self-sacrifice," the remainder of the day was to be left at his disposal to rest in. The further program—in which His Excellency the Governor-General himself was to take part—would be arranged only after the personal desires of the "modest hero" had been consulted.

A 'phone to the gallery where my Exhibition was on—or an inquiry of almost anyone connected with the show at the Town Hall, for that matter—would apprise Allen that I was staying at the Australia, and there I knew he would come direct the moment he could shake himself free from his entertainers. Someone was to take him off to lunch, to be sure, but—especially as it was reported that he was already dieting to get back to riding weight—I felt sure this would not detain him long. "It will be about three," I told myself, and left word at the office that any man asking for me around that hour should be brought straight to my rooms without further question. I also 'phoned Lady X—— and begged off from showing her and a party of friends from Government House my pictures at four, as I had promised a couple of days previously. Being borne off to the inevitable and interminable Australian afternoon teas—or to anything else I could not easily shake myself free from very shortly after five—was one of the worst ordeals incident to the spell of lionizing that had set in for me from the day of my arrival in Sydney. What did I care for Sydney, anyhow? Paris was my goal—gay, cynical, heartless Paris, who took or rejected what her lovers laid at her feet only as it stirred, or failed to stir, her jaded pulses, asking not how it was made or what it had cost. Paris! To bring that languid beauty fawning to my own feet for a day—even for an hour, my hour—that would be something worth living—or dying—for. For many years I had been telling myself that (between three and five in the afternoon, of course) and now—quite aside from my nocturnal flights there on the wings of the "Green Lady"—it seemed that the end so long striven for was almost in sight.

I lunched lightly—a planked red snapper and a couple of alligator pears—in my room, and toward two o'clock (to be well on the safe side) slipped into the old hunting jacket I have mentioned, and was ready; just that—ready. My nerves were absolutely steady. The hand holding the palette knife with which (to kill the passing minutes) I began daubing pigments upon a rough rectangle of blotched canvas on an easel in the embrasure of the windows, might have adjusted the hair-spring of my wrist-watch, and the beat of my heart was slow and strong and steady like the throb of the engines of a liner in mid-ocean. If either hand or nerve inclined more one way than the other, it was toward relaxation rather than tenseness. Tenseness—with a man who has himself in hand—is for the moment of action, not for the interval of waiting which precedes it. My whole feeling was that of complete adequacy; but then, the sensation was no new one to me—at that time of day.

Exhausting the gobs of variegated colour on my palette, I went to a table in the bathroom and started chipping the delicately tinted linings from the contents of a packing case of assorted sea shells, confining my attentions for the moment to a species of bivalve whose refulgent inner surface had caught and held the lambent liquid gold of sunshine that had filtered through five fathoms of limpid sea-water to reach the coral caverns where it had grown. Powdering the coruscant scalings in a mortar, I screened them from time to time, carefully noting the gradations of colour—ranging from soft fawn to scintillant saffron—as the more indurated particles stood out the longer against the friction of the pestle. At this time, I might explain, I was in the tentative stage of my experimentation to evolve and perfect a greater variety of media than had hitherto been available with which to express in colour the interminable moods of sea and sky and sunshine. The value of my contribution to art—not yet complete after five years—will have to be judged when I pass it on to my contemporaries and posterity. Of the part these colours played in my later and more permanent success (to differentiate it from the spectacular but transient spell of fame upon the threshold of which I stood at the moment of which I write), I can only say that had I been confined to the pigments with which my predecessors had been forced to express themselves, I should never have risen above the rating of a second or third class dauber of sea-scapes.

CHAPTER II
HARD-BIT DERELICTS

With Allen and his coming in the back of my brain, it was only natural that my thoughts, as I ground and sifted and sorted the golden powders, should turn to Kai and the train of events leading up to the ghastly tragedy of the Cora Andrews, so distorted a version of which had gone abroad as a consequence of the fact that Allen was alive and Bell was dead, and that I, so far, had not told what I knew of the circumstances under which the one and the other had been induced to board the stricken "black-birder."

It must have been, I reflected, its comparative remoteness from all of even the least-sailed of the South Pacific trade routes that was responsible for making Kai Atoll, a barely perceptible smudge on the chart of the Louisiades, the unofficial rendezvous for the most picturesque lot of cut-throats, blackguards and beachcombers that "The Islands" had known since the days of "Bully" Hayes and his care-free contemporaries. Like had attracted like after the original nucleus gathered, safety had come with numbers, and at the time of my arrival no man whose misdeeds had not made him important enough to send a gunboat after needed to depart from that secure haven except of his own free will.

Among a score of hard-bit derelicts whose grinning or scowling phizzes flashed up in memory at the thought of that sun-baked loop of coral, with its rag-tag of wind-whipped coco palms and its crescent of zinc and thatch-roofed shacks, only three—or four including myself—occupied my mind for the moment. Allen—reckless daredevil that he was—had come to Kai from somewhere in the Solomons for the very good and sufficient reason that it was the only island south of the Line at the time where his welcome would not have been either too hot or too cold to suit his fastidious taste. Bell had come, in a stove-in whaleboat, because Kai was the nearest settlement to the point where he put the Flying Scud—the trading schooner that was his last command, if we except the Cora Andrews—aground on Tuka-tuva Reef. The girl, who arrived with Bell in the whaleboat, came because he brought her. The tide-rips of Kai passage and the Devil's own toboggan were all the same to Rona—at this stage of the game, at least—so long as the big, quiet, masterful Yankee was bumping-the-bumps with her. And even afterwards—but let that transpire.

I, Roger Whitney, artist, formerly of New York and Paris, and, latterly, man-about-the French-colonies, with no fixed abode, had been landed at