no exaggeration of muscle. She had a fine mane of reddish fair hair, a
pair of sparkling eager gray eyes which could go black with passion or
even excited interest, a long nose so sensitively cut that she could
express any mood she chose with her nostrils, which expanded quite
alarmingly when she flew into a temper, and a full well-cut mouth. Her
skin had the whiteness and transparency peculiar to the women of St.
Kitts and Nevis; her head and brow were nobly modelled, and the former
she carried high to the day of her death. It was set so far back on her
shoulders and on a line so straight that it would look haughty in her
coffin. What wonder that the young planters besieged her gates, that her
aspirations soared high, that Mary Fawcett dreamed of a great destiny
for this worshipped child of her old age? As for the young planters,
they never got beyond the gates, for a dragon stood there. Mistress
Fawcett had no mind to run the risk of early entanglements. When Rachael
was old enough she would be provided with a distinguished husband from
afar, selected by the experienced judgement of a woman of the world.

But Mary Fawcett, still hot-headed and impulsive in her second
half-century, was more prone to err in crises than her daughter. In
spite of the deeper passions of her nature, Rachael, except when under
the lash of strong excitement, had a certain clearness of insight and
deliberation of judgement which her mother lacked to her last day.


III

Rachael had just eaten the last of her sixteenth birthday sweets when,
at a ball at Government House, she met John Michael Levine. It was her
début; she was the fairest creature in the room, and, in the idiom of
Dr. Hamilton, the men besieged her as were she Brimstone Hill in