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Henley.

It was at Thursday Island, too, that he met Liane.

She was the only daughter of Jean Charbonnel, a French trader, and her mother had been a Tongan. Liane had been educated in New Caledonia, but she left school the year Tony was in the North. She was sixteen, not pretty, but beautiful when you came to look, with a warm brown skin and wavy black hair that seemed as if it would be very soft. Not many people looked, though, for Liane was as shy as a squirrel (and as graceful). Tony certainly did not look at first, though he observed her. He met her at her father’s house and they became friends, like children, for she was absurdly young for her age, and somehow she made Tony feel boyish too. That other little girl, Pamela, ever so far away in London, had made him feel as old as the hills and infinitely less green, but Liane was quite different. Tony supposed that if he had ever had a sister it might have been a little like that. Why does no boy ever dream of an elder sister?

Charbonnel encouraged the friendship. They were such children—they liked to laugh together—no harm in that! And Liane was a lonely little girl. Tony came often to sit in the wide veranda of Charbonnel’s house; they enjoyed talking French together, Tony’s aversion to that language having evaporated with the years. Now he liked the sense of power it gave, the