Jim- Eng, strolling before his house, greeted her with a friendly nod before climbing up indoors to seek his beloved opium pipe.

The elder children clustered round her, daring from long acquaintance, pulling the skirts of her white robe with their dark fingers, and showing their brilliant teeth in expectation of a shower of glass beads.

She greeted them with a quiet smile, but always had a few friendly words for a Siamese girl, a slave owned by Bulangi, whose numerous wives were said to be of a violent temper.

Well-founded rumour said also that the domestic squabbles of that industrious cultivator ended generally in a combined assault of all his wives upon the Siamese slave.

The girl herself never complained--perhaps from dictates of prudence, but more likely through the strange, resigned apathy of half-savage womankind.