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Now when Professor No No came to live with us on the lagoon, Salesa was beside herself with curiosity, and heaped presents on Billy Hindoo in order to learn about his master. But Billy Hindoo knew nothing but his own stutter, and though he took the presents and came constantly to Salesa’s house, very little in the way of information was accomplished. At last, greatly daring, Salesa arrayed herself in her finest clothes, and with servants carrying gifts of pigs and chickens, went down to the lagoon to pay a visit to the stranger. She found Professor No No sitting at his table, looking at dead fish through bits of glass, and he never turned round as the party halted at the taboo line and coughed deprecatorily in order to attract his attention. Then Salesa, who feared neither devil nor man, took the baskets in her arms and stepped across the taboo, saying in a voice of sweetness, “Professor No No! Professor No No!”

He sprang from the table and rushed at her, waving his arms, and screaming as was his wont, “No, no! No, no!” while she, overcome with terror, dropped the gifts and fled like a sea mew on the wings of the wind. That night all Uvea joked about her discomfiture, while she sat in her house and cried, and Billy Hindoo was invited everywhere to tell the story in the antics that served him in the place of a tongue. But once Salesa had set her heart on a thing she never faltered nor turned aside; and though she waited and waited, it was not as one conquered or resigned. When the quarrel came between Billy Hindoo and his master, she saw the means, in Professor No No’s desolation and abandonment, of obtaining the satisfaction of her purpose. For the white man, thus left to himself, grew increasingly dirty and uncared for; and his camp, once so clean under the care of Billy Hindoo, became as a pigsty of empty cans and bottles. Nothing therein was washed, and the savor of Professor No No and his camp blew noisomely across the taboo line as one walked to leeward.

One day, after spying out that he had already sailed out for more fish to look at through bits of glass, Salesa crept into the settlement and began to make it clean again. She carried away all the tins and bottles; she swept the disordered grass; she entered the professor’s tent, filling his water-bottles, making his bed and decorating it with flowers and laumaile. Then, as she had so often watched Billy Hindoo from a distance, she spread the table with a clean cloth, and on it she placed a bottle of beer and a tin of sardines under a wire netting and three ship’s biscuits in a row. Then she went back and hid in the undergrowth, waiting and waiting, like a warrior in an ambush.

But Professor No No made no sign as he landed from his boat, nor did he seem to perceive that anything unusual had taken place in the time he had been gone. He drank the bottle of beer and ate the sardines and biscuit, never troubling himself whence they had come; and while Salesa waited and waited with a suffocating heart, he looked at dead fish through bits of glass. But day by day she returned to his camp with the assiduity of a mother to her nursing child; and by degrees growing bolder with custom, she no longer watched until Professor No No had departed, but moved here and there about his land, secure by reason of his blindness and preoccupation. Like a wild animal to whom one approaches with gentleness and precaution, thus it was with Professor No No in the hands of Salesa. First he saw her only at a distance as she cleaned and swept; then a little closer as she spread his table and laid out his bottle of beer and the sardines and biscuit; then it came about that she even touched him with impunity, and sat beside him in a chair as he continued to look at dead fish through bits of glass. At last she dared to speak, telling him softly the names of the dead fish, which he wrote down in a little book, and informing him also that her name was Salesa, and that she loved him.