“For God’s sake, Mary,” he exclaimed, “let the girl have a flirtation without making a tragedy of it.  She is quite right.  The world is what she wants.  If ever there was a woman whom Nature did not intend for a nun it is Rachael Levine.  Let her carry out her plan, and in a week she will be the belle of the Island, and my poor cousin will be consoling himself with some indignant beauty only a shade less fair.  I’ll engage to marry him off at once, if that will bring sleep to your pillow, but I can’t send him away as you propose.  I am not King George, nor yet the Captain-General.  Nor have I any argument by which to persuade him to go.  I have given him too much encouragement to stay.  I’ll keep him away from routs as long as I can—­but remember that he is young, uncommonly good-looking, and a stranger:  the girls will not let me keep him in hiding for long.  Now let the girl alone.  Let her think you’ve forgotten my new kinsman and your fears.  I don’t know any way to manage women but to let them manage themselves.  Bob Edwards failed with Catherine.  I have succeeded.  Take a leaf out of my book.  Rachael is not going through life without a stupendous love affair.  She was marked out for it, specially moulded and equipped by old Mother Nature.  Resign yourself to it, and go out and put up your hands against the next tidal wave if you want an illustration of what interference with Rachael would amount to.  I wish Levine would die, or we could get a divorce law through on this Island.  But the entire Council falls on the table with horror every time I suggest it.  Don’t worry till the time comes.  I’ll fill my house with all the pretty girls on St. Kitts and Nevis, and marry this hero of romance as soon as I can.”

Rachael went to the ball at Government House that night, glittering in a gown of brocade she had worn at the court of Denmark:  Levine had sent her trunks to Peter Lytton’s, but not her jewels.  She was the most splendid creature in the rooms, and there was no talk of anyone else.  But before the night was a third over she realized that the attention she would receive during this her second dazzling descent upon society would differ widely from her first.  The young men bowed before her in deep appreciation of her beauty, then passed on to the girls of that light-hearted band to which she no longer belonged.  She was a woman with a tragic history and a living husband; she had a reputation for severe intellectuality, and her eyes, the very carriage of her body, expressed a stern aloofness from the small and common exteriorities of life.  The Governor, the members of Council, of the Assembly, of the bench and bar, and the clergy, flocked about her, delighted at her return to the world, but she was the belle of the matrons, and not a young man asked her to dance.

She shrugged her shoulders when she saw how it was to be.