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"Poor dear old dad hadn't known any better. Some stranger he had drunk with at the club had told him that we ought to be sent to Virginia, that there's where the finest ladies were. Oh, father did so want us to be ladies. I believe that man must have known just what a joke it would be for us to go there. It was a joke. I have laughed over it myself since. But Oreena, it almost killed her. She wouldn't let them know that it hurt so much, but she nearly died. I didn't cry at all. I talked back to them in good plain beachcomber English—about their grandmothers.

"We had to leave, of course. But it took so long to write father and get an answer, and they just couldn't throw us out in the street. We came on here to San Francisco and stopped with Mrs. Collins. You know of her, don't you?"

Anyone that Kate Collins liked had a good friend. She was a San Francisco woman of prominent family; and though in her younger days the family had made all the trouble that a prominent family can make when it sees the favourite daughter throwing herself away on a mere nobody, she married a young sea captain and sailed with him. When she liked anyone the world could go hang before she would change her opinion for its approval. She had often been at Pulotu, knew the Combes—knew all about them. Oreena and Nada had visited her on their way to Virginia; they stayed with her again on their return. The sisters were much alike in appearance, but Mrs. Collins loved one and intensely disliked the other. By some such artifice as only a resourceful woman could have imagined, she had induced Oreena to want to return home, and had persuaded Nada to stay on with her. This was accomplished without at all offending Oreena, otherwise Nada, who had always given up anything at any time for her sister, would not have remained.