brightest boy on the Island, but that a nation lay folded in his saucy
audacious brain they hardly could be expected to know.


V

The Great House of Peter Lytton was hung with white from top to bottom,
and every piece of furniture looked as if the cold wing of death had
touched it. A white satin gown, which had come from London for Rachael
six years before,--just too late, for she never went to a ball
again,--was taken from her mahogany press and wrapped about her wasted
body. Her magnificent hair was put out of sight in a cap of blond lace.

The fashionable world of St. Croix, which had seen little of Rachael in
life, came to the ceremonious exit of her body. They sat along the four
sides of the large drawing-room, looking like a black dado against the
white walls, and the Rev. Cecil Wray Goodchild, the pastor of the larger
number of that sombre flock, sonorously read the prayers for the dead.
Hugh Knox felt that his was the right to perform that ceremony; but he
was a Presbyterian, and Peter Lytton was not one of his converts. He was
there, however, and so were several Danes, whose colourless faces and
heads completed the symbolization encircling the coffin. People of
Nevis, St. Christopher, and St. Croix were there, the sisters born of
the same mother, a kinsman of Hamilton's, himself named James Hamilton,
these bleached people of the North, whose faces, virtuous as they were,
would have seemed to the dead woman to shed the malignant aura of
Levine's,--and the boy for whom the sacrificial body had been laid on
the altar. He paid his debt in wretchedness then and there, and stood by
the black pall which covered his mother, feeling a hundred years older
than the brother who sat demurely on Mrs. Lytton's agitated lap.