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"Of me? What was this dream?"

"I could make little of it. But it was of a time when Naia was a child at your breast. I see you still, as it was in the dream, rocking her in your arms and weeping."

"I was directed to you of a certainty," Mauri replied, in an awe-struck voice. "I am greatly troubled, and it is of Naia I would speak."

The old woman drew up her only chair for her guest. Going to a shelf in a corner, she returned with a coconut shell in which she kept her smoking materials. She offered it to Mauri, who shook her head. Taio Vahiné seated herself on the floor, her small bare feet tucked beneath her, with the lamp at her elbow. Peeling a leaf from the cake of black tobacco, she toasted it over the flame of the lamp, then rolled it in a strip of dried pandanus leaf. She lighted the cigarette and let the smoke curl slowly from her nostrils.

"I am waiting, Mauri," she said, presently; "but speak in your own good time."

Mauri looked searchingly into the wrinkled face of her companion.