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CHAPTER I.

(Alice Lauder, New Arcadia, to Helen Macgregor, Skye.)

“Dear old Helen,—

I ONCE tried to keep a diary long ago, but in the end I found, like most people, that writing to oneself is the most tiresome thing in the world. One needs to be a very perfect Christian to hold the mirror up to nature in that way with complacency; yet now you want me to take to journalism for your own private benefit, and to tell you what I am doing and thinking, and seeing and reading and wearing, and, above all, talking about, here in this little green corner of the world nursed by the South Pacific surges.

“Could we but have foreseen, as they say in novels—it always makes me so angry that they never will foresee anything—that you and I would be parted for so long without a word, or even benefit of postman, for more than ten

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