The wives of other planters followed Mistress Hamilton, for in that soft voluptuous climate, where the rush and fret of great cities are but a witch’s tale, disapproval dies early.  They would have called long since had they not been a trifle in awe of Nevis, more, perhaps, of Mistress Fawcett’s sharp tongue, then indolent.  But when Mistress Hamilton suddenly reminded them that they were Christians, and that Dr. Fawcett was dead, they put on their London gowns, ordered out their coaches, and called.  Mary Fawcett received them with a courteous indifference.  Her resentment had died long since, and they seemed to her, with their coaches and brocades and powdered locks, but the ghosts of the Nevis of her youth.  Her child, her estate, and her few tried friends absorbed her.  For the sake of her daughter’s future, she ordered out her ancient coach and made the round of the Island once a year.  The ladies of St. Kitts were as moderately punctilious.

And so the life of Rachael Fawcett for sixteen years passed uneventfully enough.  Her spirits were often very high, for she inherited the Gallic buoyancy of her father as well as the brilliant qualities of his mind.  In the serious depths of her nature were strong passions and a tendency to melancholy, the result no doubt of the unhappy conditions of her birth.  But her mother managed so to occupy her eager ambitious mind with hard study that the girl had little acquaintance with herself.  Her English studies were almost as varied as a boy’s, and in addition to her accomplishments in the ancient and modern languages, she painted, and sang, played the harp and guitar.  Mary Fawcett, for reasons of her own, never let her forget that she was the most educated girl on the Islands.

“I never was one to lie on a sofa all day and fan myself, while my children sat on the floor with their blacks, and munched sugar-cane, or bread and sling,” she would remark superfluously.  “All my daughters are a credit to their husbands; but I mean that you shall be the most brilliant woman in the Antilles.”

The immediate consequences of Rachael’s superior education were two:  her girl friends ceased to interest her, and ambitions developed in her strong imaginative brain.  In those days women so rarely distinguished themselves individually that it is doubtful if Rachael had ever heard of the phenomenon, and the sum of her worldly aspirations was a wealthy and intellectual husband who would take her to live and to shine at foreign courts.  Her nature was too sweet and her mind too serious for egoism or the pettier vanities, but she hardly could help being conscious of the energy of her brain; and if she had passed through childhood in ignorance of her beauty, she barely had entered her teens when her happy indifference was dispelled; for the young planters besieged her gates.