him to call on the following day and to come alone. The two women did
not meet again that night.

But there is little privacy in the houses of St. Kitts and Nevis. Either
the upper part of almost every room is built of ornamental lattice-work,
or the walls are set with numerous jalousies, that can be closed when a
draught is undesirable but conduct the slightest sound. Rachael's room
adjoined her mother's. She knew that the older woman was as uneasily
awake as herself, though from vastly different manifestations of the
same cause. At four o'clock, when the guinea fowl were screeching like
demons, and had awakened the roosters and the dogs to swell the infernal
chorus of a West Indian morning, Rachael sat up in bed and laughed
noiselessly.

"What a night!" she thought. "And for what? A man who companioned me for
four hours as no other man had ever done? and who made me feel as if the
world had turned to fire and light? It may have been but a mood of my
own, it is so long since I have talked with a man near to my own
age--and he is so near!--and yet so real a man.... No one could call him
handsome, for he looks like a flayed Carib, and I have met some of the
handsomest men in Europe and not given them a thought. Yet this man kept
me beside him for four hours, and has me awake a whole night because he
is not with me. Has the discipline of these last years, then, gone for
nothing? Am I but an excitable West Indian after all, and shall I have
corded hands before I am twenty-five? It was a mistake to shut myself
away from danger. Had I been constantly meeting the young men of the
Island and all strangers who have come here during the last two years, I
should not be wild for this one--even if he has something in him unlike
other men--and lie awake all night like the silly women who dream
everlastingly of the lover to come. I am a fool."