Rachael was riding home one afternoon from Basseterre, where she had been purchasing summer lawns and cambrics.  It was March, and the winter sun had begun to use its summer fuel; but the trades blew softly, and there was much shade on the road above the sea.  There was one long stretch, however, where not a tree grew, and Rachael drew rein for a moment before leaving the avenue of tamarinds which had rustled above her head for a mile or more.  Although it was a hot scene that lay before her, it was that which, when away from home, for some reason best known to her memory, had always been first to rise.  The wide pale-gray road rose gradually for a long distance, dipped, and rose again.  On either side were cane-fields, their tender greens sharp against the deep hard blue of the sea on the left, rising to cocoanut groves and the dark heights of the mountains above the road.  Far away, close to the sea, was Brimstone Hill, that huge isolated rock so near in shape to the crater of Mount Misery.  Its fortifications showed 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.”