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Torringley to her niece, late the following evening, as she came to the door of Helen's room before she said good-night. The girl was lying on a couch at the further end of the room, looking through the opened window out into the shadows of the night. The pale, clear-cut face flushed. "I like him very much, auntie. And I have been thinking." "Thinking of what, dear?"
He turned away again to the window, but not so quickly but that he could see she was crying softly to herself, as she bent her face over the table. Three days after, Mrs. Torringley showed her nephew a note that she had found on her niece's dressing-table: "Do not blame me. I cannot help it. I love him, and am going away with him to another country. Perhaps it is my mother's blood.
Are these the sketches you told me Colonel Torringley made when he was in New Zealand?" and as he extended his hand for the book, the hot blood surged to his sallow forehead. "Yes, they were all drawn by my father. I found them about a year since in the bottom of one of his trunks. He died ten years ago." Slowly the young man turned them over one by one.
Then, in a curiously strained voice, he said: "Miss Torringley, may I ask a favour of you? Will you give me that sketch?" * A white man who had adopted Maori life and customs. She moved quickly to the table, and untied the portfolio again. "Which, Dr. Rauparaha? The last " "Yes," he interrupted, with sudden fierceness, "the Last Shot at Maungatabu." She took it out and came over to him.
Only two or three times had he met her alone since he came to Te Ariri, and walked with her through the grounds, listening with a strange pleasure to her low, tender voice, and gazing into the deep, dark eyes, that shone with softest lustre from out the pale, olive face, set in a wealth of wavy jet-black hair. For Helen Torringley was, like himself, of mixed blood.
To-morrow he would bid these new friends goodbye this proud English lady and her beautiful, sweet-voiced niece the girl whose dark eyes and red lips had come into his day-dreams and visions of the night. And just then she came to the library door, carrying in her hand a portfolio. "Are you very busy, Dr. Rauparaha?" she said, as she entered and stood before him. "Busy! No, Miss Torringley.
"Ah," she said, in a pained voice, "don't say that. I wish I had never asked you to look at it. I have read the papers, and know how the Maori people must feel, and I am sorry, oh! so sorry, that I have unthinkingly aroused what must surely be painful memories to you." "Do not think of it, Miss Torringley. Such things always will be.
Rauparaha had much writing to do, and passed his mornings and afternoons in the quiet library. Sometimes, as he wrote, a shadow would flit across the wide, sunlit veranda, and Helen Torringley would flit by, nodding pleasantly to him through the windows.
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