It shocked her, too, sometimes, when she was apart from him, a cool and reasoning creature.

With him, she loved him--in truth, at times a vexed and worried love; but love it was, a love that was stronger than she.
"This La Grippe is nothing," he was saying.

"It hurts a bit, and gives one a nasty headache, but it doesn't compare with break-bone fever." "Have you had that, too ?" she queried absently, intent on the heaven-sent justification she was finding in his arms.
And so, with absent queries, she led him on, till suddenly his words startled her.
He had had the fever in a secret colony of thirty lepers on one of the Hawaiian Islands.
"But why did you go there ?" she demanded.
Such royal carelessness of body seemed criminal.
"Because I didn't know," he answered.

"I never dreamed of lepers.

When I deserted the schooner and landed on the beach, I headed inland for some place of hiding.