As they sailed into the bright green waters before Frederikstadt, the sun blazed down upon the white town on the white plain with a vicious energy which Rachael had never seen on Nevis during the hottest and most silent months of the year.  She closed her eyes and longed for the cool shallows of the harbour, and even Alexander ceased to watch the flying fish dart like silver blades over the water, and was glad to be stowed comfortably into one of the little deck-houses.  As for the slaves, weakened by illness, they wept and refused to gather themselves together.

But Rachael’s soul, which had felt faint for many days, rose triumphant in the face of this last affliction.  Like all West Indians, she hated extreme heat, and during those months on her own Islands when the trades hibernated, rarely left the house.  She remembered little of St. Croix.  Her imagination had disassociated itself from all connected with it, but now it burst into hideous activity and pictured interminable years of scorching heat and blinding glare.  For a moment she descended to the verge of hysteria, from which she struggled with so mighty an effort that it vitalized her spirit for the ordeal of her new life; and when Hamilton, cursing himself, came to assist her to land, she was able to remark that she recalled the beauty of Christianstadt, and to anathematize her sea-green maids.

The trail of Spain is over all the islands, and on St. Croix has left its picturesque mark in the heavy arcades which front the houses in the towns.  Behind these arcades one can pass from street to street with brief egress into the awful downpour of the sun, and they give to both towns an effect of architectural beauty.  At that time palms and cocoanuts grew in profusion along the streets of Frederikstadt and in the gardens, tempering the glare of the sun on the coral.

Peter Lytton’s coach awaited the Hamiltons, and at six o’clock they started for their new home.  The long driveway across the Island was set with royal palms, beyond which rolled vast fields of cane.  St. Croix was approaching the height of her prosperity, and almost every inch of her fertile acres was under cultivation.  They rolled up and over every hill, the heavy stone houses, with their negro hamlets and mills, rising like half-submerged islands, unless they crowned a height.  The roads swarmed with Africans, who bowed profoundly to the strangers in the fine coach, grinning an amiable welcome.  Surrounded by so generous a suggestion of hospitality and plenty, with the sun low in the west, the spirits of the travellers rose, and Rachael thought with more composure upon the morrow’s encounter with her elder sisters.  She knew them very slightly, their husbands less.  When her connection with Hamilton began, correspondence between them had ceased; but like others they had accepted the relation, and for the last three years Hamilton had been a welcome guest at their houses when business took him to St. Croix.