Little things! She held the ensanguined head of Louis Devoe in her white apron. Tiny streams of red widened on her apron and dripped upon the floor. Her face was bright and tender.

“Little things, indeed!” I thought again. “The head-hunters are right. These are the things that women like you to do for them.”

Chloe came close to me. There was no one in sight. She looked up at me with sea-blue eyes that said things they had never said before.

“You think of me,” she said. “You are the man I was describing. You think of the little things, and they are what make the world worth living in. The man for me must consider my little wishes, and make me happy in small ways. He must bring me little red peaches in December if I wish for them, and then I will love him till June. I will have no knight in armour slaying his rival or killing dragons for me. You please me very well, Tommy.”

I stooped and kissed her. Then a moisture broke out on my forehead, and I began to feel weak. I saw the red stains vanish from Chloe’s apron, and the head of Louis Devoe turn to a brown, dried coco-nut.

“There will be coco-nut pudding for dinner, Tommy, boy,” said Chloe gaily, “and you must come. I must go in for a little while.”

She vanished in a delightful flutter.

Dr. Stamford tramped up hurriedly. He seized my pulse as though it were his own property that I had escaped with.

“You are the biggest fool outside of any asylum!” he said, angrily. “Why did you leave your bed? And the idiotic things you’ve been doing!—and no wonder, with your pulse going like a sledge-hammer.”

“Name some of them,” said I.

“Devoe sent for me,” said Stamford. “He saw you from his window go to old Campos’ store, chase him up the hill with his own yardstick, and then come back and make off with his biggest coco-nut.”

“It’s the little things that count, after all,” said I.

“It’s your little bed that counts with you just now,” said the doctor. “You come with me at once, or I’ll throw up the case. You’re as loony as a loon.”

So I got no coco-nut pudding that evening, but I conceived a distrust as to the value of the method of the head-hunters. Perhaps for many centuries the maidens of the villages may have been looking wistfully at the heads in the baskets at the doorways, longing for other and lesser trophies.