You eat splendid food. You drink… oh, a little too much. You don’t get drunk, mind. You get… happy. You admire the turquoise sky and the sapphire sea and the emerald land. Strange tropical birds call in the trees. You savor the perfect weather. Never too hot, never too cold. If it rains, so what? The sun will come out again in a little while. You want to be a beachcomber and spend the rest of your days there. If you find a slightly brown-skinned but beautiful and willing wahine to spend them there with you, so much the better.

Hawaii is what God made after he’d done Paradise for practice. How could anyone be unhappy in a place like that?

First Lieutenant Fletcher Armitage had no trouble at all.

For one thing, Armitage-called Fletch by his friends-was a green-eyed redhead with a face full of freckles. In between the freckles, his skin was white as milk. He hated the tropical sun. He didn’t tan. He burned.

For another, his wife had left him three weeks before. He didn’t understand why. He wasn’t sure Jane understood why. He didn’t think there was somebody else. Jane hadn’t said anything about anybody else. She’d said she felt stifled in their little Wahiawa apartment. She’d said he didn’t give her enough of his time.

That had frosted his pumpkin-not that frost had anything to do with anything on Oahu. “For Christ’s sake, I give you every minute I’ve got when I’m not with my guns!” he’d howled. He served with the Thirteenth Field Artillery Battalion-the Lucky Thirteenth, they called themselves-in the Twenty-fourth Division. “You knew you were marrying an officer when you said ‘I do.’ ”

She’d only shrugged. She was small and blond and stubborn. “It’s not enough,” she’d said. Now she had the apartment, and presumably felt much less stifled without him in it. She was talking with a lawyer. How she’d pay him on a schoolteacher’s salary was beyond Fletch, but odds were she’d figure out a way. She usually did.