nd several others offered their
services. All aristocratic Nevis were invited to contribute their
presence and the price of a ticket, and the performance would end with
a dance that should outlast the night.

Nevis was in a great flutter of excitement, partly because of the
promised ball, for which the military band of St. Kitts was engaged,
partly because but a favoured few, and years ago, had heard Byam
Warner read. Indeed, his low voice was never heard three yards away,
in a drawing-room, although it had frequently made Charlestown ring.
He was now on his old footing at the Great Houses. The nobler felt
many a pang of conscience that they had permitted a stranger at Bath
House to accomplish a work so manifestly their own, while others dared
not be stigmatised as provincial, prejudiced, middle-class. If London
could afford a superb indifference to the mere social offences of a
great poet, well, so could Nevis. They forgot that London had arisen
as one man and flung him out, neck and crop. Lady Hunsdon had eclipsed
London; rather, for the nonce did she epitomise it. Her gowns came not
even from Bond Street. They were confected in Paris. Hers was the most
distinguished Tory _salon_ in London. Her son was the golden fish for
which all maidens fortunate enough to be within reach of the sacred
pond angled. It was whispered that Warner would accompany Hunsdon to
London, be a guest in his several stately homes, possibly be returned
from one of his numerous boroughs. The poet approached his zenith for
the second time.

Curricles, phaetons, gigs, britzskas, barouches, family chaises
brought the elect of Nevis, and their guests, from St. Kitts to Bath
House a little before nine o'clock; the lowly of Charlestown to
the terrace before the ever open windows of the saloon where the
performance was to be held. In the friendly bedrooms of the hotel
there was a great shaking down of skirts, rearranging of tresses. Miss
Medora Ogilvy went straight to Anne's room, by invitation, and finding
it empty, proceeded to beautify herself. Byron had been much in vogue
at the time of her birth--was yet, for that matter--and she had been
named romantically. But there was little romance in the shrewd brain
of Miss Ogilvy. She was well educated and accomplished--like many of
her kind she had gone to school in England; she could cook and manage
even West Indian servants--her mother was an invalid; and she wished
for nothing under heaven but to marr