perfume of the flowers.  Hamilton had been in many ball-rooms, but never in one like this.  He abstained from the madeiras and ports which were passed about at brief intervals by the swinging coloured women in their gay frocks and white turbans; but he was intoxicated, nevertheless, and more than once on the point of leaving the house.  The unreality of it all held him more than weakness, for in some things James Hamilton was strong enough.  The weakness in him was down at the roots of his character, and he was neither a feathercock nor a flasher.  He had no intention of making love to Rachael until he saw his future more clearly than he did to-night.  During the fortnight that had passed since he met her, he had thought of little else, and to-night he wanted nothing else, but impulsive and passionate as he was, he came of a race of hard-headed Scots.  He had no mind for a love affair of tragic seriousness, even while his quickened imagination pictured the end.

He deliberately left her side after a time and joined a group of men who were smoking in the court.  After an hour of politics his brain had less blood in it, and when he found himself standing beside Rachael on the verandah he suggested that they follow other guests into the Park.  He gave Rachael his arm in the courtly fashion of the day, and they walked about the open paths and talked of the negroes singing in the cane-fields, and the squalid poverty of the North, as if their hearts were as calm as they are to-day.  People turned often to look at them, commenting according to the mixing of their essences, but all concurring in praise of so much beauty.  Hamilton’s sunburn had passed the acute stage, leaving him merely brown, and his black silk small clothes and lace ruffles, his white silk stockings and pumps, were vastly becoming.  His hair, lightly powdered, was tied with a white ribbon, but although he carried himself proudly, there was no manifest in his bearing that the vanities consumed much of his thought.  He was gallanted like a young blood of the period, and so were the young men of St. Kitts.  Rachael wore a heavy gold-coloured satin, baring the neck, and a stiff and pointed stomacher, her hair held high with a diamond comb.  Her fairness was dazzling in the night-light, and it was such a light as Hamilton never had seen before:  for in the Tropics the moon is golden, and the stars are crystal.  The palm leaves, high on their slender shafts, glittered like polished dark-green metal, and the downpour was so dazzling that more than once the stranger shaded his eyes with his hand.  Had it not been for the soft babble of many voices, the silence would have been intense, until the ear was tuned to the low tinkle of the night bells, for the sea was calm.