This pavilion, designed for the hotter weeks of the hurricane season, but seldom used by the Fawcetts, was a small stone building, with two bedrooms and a living room, a swimming bath, and several huts for servants.  The outbuildings were dilapidated, but the house after an airing and scrubbing was as fit for entertainment as any on St. Kitts.  The furniture in the Tropics is of cane, and there are no carpets or hangings to invite destruction.  Even the mattresses are often but plaited thongs of leather, covered with strong linen, and stretched until they are hard as wood.  All Mary Fawcett’s furniture was of mahogany, the only wood impervious to the boring of the West Indian worm.  This tiny house on the mountain needed but a day’s work to clean it, and another to transform it into an arbour of the forest.  The walls of the rooms were covered with ferns, orchids, and croton leaves.  Gold and silver candelabra had been carried up from the house, and they would hold half a hundred candles.

All day the strong black women climbed the gorge and hill, their hips swinging, baskets of wine, trays of delicate edibles, pyramids of linen, balanced as lightly on their heads as were they no more in weight and size than the turban beneath; their arms hanging, their soft voices scolding the “pic’nees” who stumbled after them.

Toward evening, Rachael and Kitty Hamilton walked down the mountain together, and lingered in the heavy beauty of the gorge.  The ferns grew high above their heads, and palms of many shapes.  The dark machineel with its deadly fruit, the trailing vines on the tamarind trees, the monkeys leaping, chattering with terror, through flaming hybiscus and masses of orchid, the white volcanic rock, the long torn leaves of the banana tree, the abrupt declines, crimson with wild strawberries, the loud boom of the sunset gun from Brimstone Hill—­Rachael never forgot a detail of that last walk with her old friend.  Hers was not the nature for intimate friendships, but Catherine Hamilton had been one of her first remembered playmates, her bridesmaid, and had hastened to companion her when she emerged from the darkness of her married life.  But Catherine was an austere girl, of no great mental liveliness, and the friendship, although sincere, was not rooted in the sympathies and affections.  She believed Rachael to be the most remarkable woman in the world, and had never dared to contradict her, although she lowered her fine head to no one else.  But female virtue, as they expressed it in the eighteenth century, stood higher in her estimation than all the gifts of mind and soul which had been lavished upon Rachael Levine, and she was the first to desert her when the final step was taken.  But on this evening there was no barrier, and she talked of her future with the man she was to marry.  She was happy and somewhat sentimental.  Rachael sighed and set her lips.  All her girlhood friends were either married or about to be—­except Christiana,