s, and she
hardly dared open her eyes lest Nevis vanish and she find herself
striding over the moor, her head down, her hands clutching her cape,
while the North Sea thundered in her ears.

She lifted her head suddenly, straining her own throat. A bird poured
forth a flood of melody that seemed to give voice to the perfumes and
the rich beauty of the night, without troubling the silence. She had
read of this "nightingale of a tropic noon" but had not imagined that
a small brown bird, bred below the equator, could rival in power and
dulcet tones the great songster of the North. But it sang as if its
throat had the compass of a Mario's, and in a moment another philomel
pealed forth his desire, then another, and another, until the whole
island seemed to swirl in a musical tide. Anne, with a sudden
unconscious gesture, opened her arms and flung them out, as if to
embrace and hold all the enchantment of a Southern night before it
fled; and for the first time in her life she found that realities
could give the spirit a deep intoxicating draught.

The nightingales trilled into silence. The last sweet note seemed to
drift out over the water, and then Anne heard another sound, the deep
low murmur of the Caribbean Sea. Her mind swung to Byam Warner, to
the extraordinary poem which ten years ago had made his fame and
interpreted this unceasing melancholy of the sea's chant into a dirge
over the buried continent and its fate. With the passionate energy of
youthful genius abandoning itself to the ecstasies of imagination, he
had sung the lament of Atlantis, compelled the blue sepulchre to
recede, and led a prosaic but dazzled world through cities of such
beauty and splendour, such pleasant gardens and opulent wilds as the
rest of Earth had never dreamed of. He peopled it still with an
arrogant and wanton race, masters of the lore and the arts that had
gone with them, awaiting the great day when the enchantment should
lift and the most princely continent Earth has borne should rise once
more to the surface of the sea, lifting these jewelled islands, her
mountain peaks, high among the clouds.

It had been Byam Warner's first epic poem, and although he had won the
critical public with his songs of the Caribbean Sea and of Nevis, the
island of his birth, it was this remarkable achievement, white-hot
from first to last with poetic fire, replete with fascinating pictures
and living tragedy, that gave him as wide a popularity as any nov