A young girl soon makes herself at home anywhere; and Muriel, protected alike by her native innocence and by the invisible cloak of Polynesian taboo, quickly learned to understand and to sympathize with these poor dusky mothers.  One morning, some weeks after their arrival, she passed down the main street of the village, accompanied by Felix and their two attendants, and reached the marae—­the open forum or place of public assembly—­which stood in its midst; a circular platform, surrounded by bread-fruit trees, under whose broad, cool shade the people were sitting in little groups and talking together.  They were dressed in the regular old-time festive costume of Polynesia; for Boupari, being a small and remote island, too insignificant to be visited by European ships, retained still all its aboriginal heathen manners and customs.  The sight was, indeed, a curious and picturesque one.  The girls, large-limbed, soft-skinned, and with delicately rounded figures, sat on the ground, laughing and talking, with their knees crossed under them; their wrists were encinctured with girdles of dark-red dracaena leaves, their swelling bosoms half concealed, half accentuated by hanging necklets of flowers.  Their beautiful brown arms and shoulders were bare throughout; their long, black hair was gracefully twined and knotted with bright scarlet flowers.  The men, strong and stalwart, sat behind on short stools or lounged on the buttressed roots of the bread-fruit trees, clad like the women in narrow waist-belts of the long red dracaena leaves, with necklets of sharks’ teeth, pendent chain of pearly shells, a warrior’s cap on their well-shaped heads, and an armlet of native beans, arranged below the shoulder, around their powerful arms.  Altogether, it was a striking and beautiful picture.  Muriel, now almost released from her early sense of fear, stood still to look at it.

The men and girls were laughing and chatting merrily together.  Most of them were engaged in holding up before them fine mats; and a row of mulberry cloth, spread along on the ground, led to a hut near one side of the marae.  Toward this the eyes of the spectators were turned.  “What is it, Mali?” Muriel whispered, her woman’s instinct leading her at once to expect that something special was going on in the way of local festivities.

And Mali answered at once, with many nods and smiles, “All right, Missy Queenie.  Him a wedding, a marriage.”

The words had hardly escaped her lips when a very pretty young girl, half smothered in flowers, and decked out in beads and fancy shells, emerged slowly from the hut, and took her way with stately tread along the path carpeted with native cloth.  She was girt round the waist with rich-colored mats, which formed a long train, like a court dress, trailing on the ground five or six feet behind her.

“That’s the bride, I suppose,” Muriel whispered, now really interested—­for what woman on earth, wherever she may be, can resist the seductive delights of a wedding?