Did any great genius ever come into the world after commonplace pre-natal conditions?  Was a maker of history ever born amidst the pleasant harmonies of a satisfied domesticity?  Of a mother who was less than remarkable, although she may have escaped being great?  Did a woman with no wildness in her blood ever inform a brain with electric fire?  The students of history know that while many mothers of great men have been virtuous, none have been commonplace, and few have been happy.  And lest the moralists of my day and country be more prone to outraged virtue, in reading this story, than were the easy-going folk who surrounded it, let me hasten to remind them that it all happened close upon a hundred and fifty years ago, and that the man and woman who gave them the brain to which they owe the great structure that has made their country phenomenal among nations, are dust on isles four hundred miles apart.

A century and a half ago women indulged in little introspective analysis.  They thought on broad lines, and honestly understood the strength of their emotions.  Moreover, although Mary Wollstonecraft was unborn and “Emile” unwritten, Individualism was germinating; and what soil so quickening as the Tropics?  Nevertheless, to admit was not to lay the question, and Rachael passed through many hours of torment before hers was settled.  She was not unhappy, for the intoxication lingered, and behind the methodical ticking of her reason, stood, calmly awaiting its time, that sense of the Inevitable which has saved so many brains from madness.  She slept little and rested less, but that sentinel in her brain prevented the frantic hopelessness which would have possessed her had she felt herself strong enough to command James Hamilton to leave the Island.

She met him several times before the night of her entertainment, and there were moments when she was filled with terror, for he did not whisper a reference to the conversation in the Park.  Had he thought better of it?  Would he go?  Would he conquer himself?  Was it but a passing madness?  When these doubts tormented her she was driven to such a state of jealous fury that she forgot every scruple, and longed only for the bond which would bind him fast; then reminded herself that she should be grateful, and endeavoured to be.  But one day when he lifted her to her horse, he kissed her wrist, and again the intoxication of love went to her head, and this time it remained there.  Once they met up in the hills, where they had been asked with others to take a dish of tea with Mistress Montgomerie.  They sat alone for an hour on one of the terraces above the house, laughing and chattering like children, then rode down the hills through the cane-fields together.  Again, they met in the Park, and sat under the banyan tree, discussing the great books they had read, all of Europe they knew.  For a time neither cared to finish that brief period of exquisite happiness and doubt, where imagination rules, and the world is unreal and wholly sweet, and they its first to love.