"We'll have to go, dear," said Kirke to his pretty wife.
"Yes, we'll have to go," she assented sadly.
She could not help feeling cross with the Titcombes for always muddling things--a little unjustly, perhaps--for her own missionary path had ever been so easy and untroubled. Mrs. Kirke was a woman of marked beauty, whose sweet imperiousness, sympathy, humor, and tact made her the adored of the islanders. She not only spoke native well, but with a zest and sparkle, a silver ripple of irony, ridicule, and good-fellowship that carried everything before it. No kings ever bothered Mrs. Kirke. Even the redoubtable Tembinok, with forty boats full of armed savages, had been stemmed in his Napoleonic career and turned back by her from his projected invasion of Apiang--presenting the missionary's wife, on his departure, with a gold-inlaid Winchester that was the apple of his eye.
"I shall make Karaitch smart for this!" she said vindictively. "I sha'n't let him off with less than twenty tons of copra for my girls' school; and he'll have to apologize, too, and swear on a shark's head to behave for a year."
"We can't all have such intrepid little wives," said Kirke, putting his arm fondly about her. Experience had shown him that in native questions she was always as good as her word, and it was with a kind of proud humility he conceded her the place he was so much less able himself to fill. He had not the faintest apprehensions about the Tarawa matter. Ada would bring the king to heel in fifteen minutes, and in twenty there would be the dawn of a new peace, with stately apologies, gifts of turtle and bonito hooks, endless and troublesomely idiomatic compliments, and incidentally a little friction with the Titcombes, who would certainly resent being saved so easily.
No, Kirke wasn't afraid of Karaitch. Ada would settle Karaitch out of hand. What he dreaded was that twenty miles of water under the noonday sun, and the problem of Daisy--Daisy, their little girl of eight, who was playing so contentedly on the floor with the presents Santa Claus had just brought her.
"Oh, Walter, I can't let Daisy go again!" cried Mrs. Kirke. "Last time she nearly died in the boat, and you know she wasn't really herself for weeks and weeks afterwards."