their teeth against the faded
sky, and St. Christopher slept easily while tentative conquerors
approached, looked hard at this Gibraltar of the West Indies, and sailed
away.

But there scarcely was a sail on the sea to-day. Its blue rose and fell,
in that vast unbroken harmony which quickens the West Indian at times
into an intolerable sense of his isolation. Rachael recalled how she had
stared at it in childish resentment, wondering if a mainland really lay
beyond, if Europe were a myth. She did not care if she never set foot on
a ship again, and her ambitions were in the grave with her desire for a
wealthy and intellectual husband.

On the long road, rising gray and hot between the bright green
cane-fields, horsemen approached, and a number of slave women moved
slowly: women with erect rigid backs balancing large baskets or stacks
of cane on their heads, the body below the waist revolving with a
pivotal motion which suggests an anatomy peculiar to the tropics. They
had a dash of red about them somewhere, and their turbans were white.
Rachael's imagination never gave her St. Kitts without its slave women,
the "pic'nees" clinging to their hips as they bore their burdens on the
road or bent over the stones in the river. They belonged to its
landscape, with the palms and the cane-fields, the hot gray roads, and
the great jewel of the sea.

Rachael left the avenue and rode onward. One of the horsemen took off
his Spanish sombrero and waved it. She recognized Dr. Hamilton and shook
her whip at him. He and his companion spurred their horses, and a moment
later Rachael and James Hamilton had met.

"An unexpected pleasure for me, this sudden descent of my young
kinsman," said the doctor, "but a great one, for he brings me news of
all in Scotland, and he saw Will the day before he sailed."

"It is too hot to stand here talking," said Rachael. "Come home with me
to a glass of Spanish port, and cake perhaps."

The doctor was on his way to a consultation, but he ordered his relative
to go and pay his respects to Mistress Fawcett, and rode on whistling.
The two he had recklessly left to their own devices exchanged
platitudes, and covertly examined each other with quick admiration.

There are dark Scots, and Hamilton was one of them. Although tall and
slight, he was knit with a close and peculiar elegance, which made him
look his best on a horse and in white linen. His face was burnt to the
hue of brick-dust by the first qu