few guineas I have. My cousin, the doctor, has taken me in hand, and if
I have any business capacity I shall soon find it out. But I ached for
the army, and failing that, I'd have liked being a scholar--as I know
you are, by your eyes."

His Scotch accent was not unlike that of the West Indians, particularly
of the Barbadians; but his voice, although it retained the huskiness of
the wet North, had, somewhere in its depths, a peculiar metallic quality
which startled Rachael every time it rang out, and was the last of all
memories to linger, when memories were crumbling in a brain that could
stand no more.

How it happened, Rachael spent the saner hours of the morrow attempting
to explain, but they sat under the tamarinds until the sun went down,
and Nevis began to robe for the night. Once they paused in their
desultory talk and listened to the lovely chorus of a West Indian
evening, that low incessant ringing of a million tiny bells. The bells
hung in the throats of nothing more picturesque than grasshoppers,
serpents, lizards, and frogs so small as to be almost invisible, but
they rang with a harmony that the inherited practice of centuries had
given them. And beyond was the monotonous accompaniment of the sea on
the rocks. Hamilton lived to be an old man, and he never left the West
Indies; but sometimes, at long and longer intervals, he found himself
listening to that Lilliputian orchestra, his attention attracted to it,
possibly, by a stranger; and then he remembered this night, and the
woman for whom he would have sacrificed earth and immortality had he
been lord of them.

Heaven knows what they talked about. While it was light they stared out
at the blue sea or down on the rippling cane-fields, not daring to