peculiarities. For all she was a pakeha, clad in a fine coat, wearing boots, and carrying cigarettes about with her only by way of Maori mouth-openers: for all this, her heart was the heart of a fellow-vagabond. It understood. She had heard Miria, and Mrs. Cameron too, talk of Pipi; but with a result of which those superior speakers were not conscious. How often she had silently sympathised with the poor old free-lance kept so straitly to the beaten track of respectability; how often she had wished for a peep at Pipi au naturel! And now she had got it; and she meant to get it again. She could not help a little mischievous enjoyment of the confusion so heroically concealed, but she took quick steps to relieve it.
“Well, I must go on,” she said briskly, rising as she spoke. “Take the other cigarette, Pipi, and here’s a shilling for some topeka. E noho koe (goodbye)! Oh, and, Pipi, don’t let’s tell Miria yet that we’ve met, shall we? It will be so nice for her to introduce us properly some day, you know!”
Pipi was game. “Haere ra” (good-bye) was all she answered, unemotionally. But she could not help one gleam of joy shooting out of her deep old eyes, and Lucy Willett saw it, and went on with a kindly laughter in her own.
That night, when she had rolled herself up in her blanket, and lain down on the whare floor (she disdained the foppishness of beds), Pipi glowed all through with satisfaction. Miria, on coming home, had found her seated, patient, pipeless, before the fire, Hana and Himi one upon each knee, both intact, both peacefully asleep; and had been so
