per hatred of his kind, a daily deeper longing to escape from this
place where man defiled so foully the lovely work of his Creator. It was
a longing too vague to amount to a hope. Hope here was inadmissible.
And yet he did not yield to despair. He set a mask of laughter on his
saturnine countenance and went his way, treating the sick to the
profit of Colonel Bishop, and encroaching further and further upon the
preserves of the two other men of medicine in Bridgetown.

Immune from the degrading punishments and privations of his
fellow-convicts, he was enabled to keep his self-respect, and was
treated without harshness even by the soulless planter to whom he had
been sold. He owed it all to gout and megrims. He had won the esteem of
Governor Steed, and--what is even more important--of Governor Steed's
lady, whom he shamelessly and cynically flattered and humoured.

Occasionally he saw Miss Bishop, and they seldom met but that she paused
to hold him in conversation for some moments, evincing her interest
in him. Himself, he was never disposed to linger. He was not, he told
himself, to be deceived by her delicate exterior, her sapling grace, her
easy, boyish ways and pleasant, boyish voice. In all his life--and it
had been very varied--he had never met a man whom he accounted more
beastly than her uncle, and he could not dissociate her from the man.
She was his niece, of his own blood, and some of the vices of it, some
of the remorseless cruelty of the wealthy planter must, he argued,
inhabit that pleasant body of hers. He argued this very often to
himself, as if answering and convincing some instinct that pleaded
otherwise, and arguing it he avoided her when it was possible, and was
frigidly civil when it was not.

Justifiable as his reasoning was, plausible as it may seem, yet he would
have done better to have trusted the instinct that was in conflict
with it. Though the same blood ran in her veins as in those of Colonel
Bishop, yet hers was free of the vices that tainted her uncle's, for
these vices were not natural to that blood; they were, in his
case, acquired. Her father, Tom Bishop--that same Colonel Bishop's
brother--had been a kindly, chivalrous, gentle soul, who, broken-hearted
by the early death of a young wife, had abandoned the Old World and
sought an anodyne for his grief in the New. He had come out to the
Antilles, bringing with him his little daughter, then five years of age,
and had given himself up to