to
wear, occasionally manifested itself in a flash of the eye or a quiver
of the nostril. Anne could not doubt that he loved her, inexperienced
in such matters as she might be. However she may have kept him at a
distance her thoughts had seldom left him, and he had betrayed
himself in a hundred ways.

Had she been half interested in Hunsdon or Abergenny and they had been
so unreasonable as to rush off and disappear merely because she had
enjoyed her first ball-room triumphs as any girl must, she would have
been both derisive and angry at the liberty; but Warner inspired no
such feminine ebullition. He was a great and sacred responsibility,
one, moreover, that she had assumed voluntarily. That he had
unexpectedly fallen in love with her but deepened this responsibility,
and she had betrayed her trust, she had betrayed her trust!

She left the road suddenly and struck upward into one of the sheltered
gorges, sat down in the shadow of the jungle and wept with the brief
violence of a tropical storm in summer. Relief was inevitable. When
the paroxism was over she found a shaded seat under a cocoanut tree
and determined not to return to the hotel for breakfast, nor indeed
until she felt herself able to endure the sight of mere people; and
endeavoured to expel all thought of Warner from her still tormented
mind. In the distance she could see Monserrat and Antigua, gray blurs
on the blue water, she could hear the singing of negroes in the cane
fields far away, but near her no living thing moved save the monkeys
in the tree tops, the blue butterflies, the jewelled humming-birds. On
three sides of her was a dense growth of banana, cocoanut and palm
trees, cactus, and a fragrant shrub covered with pink flowers. Almost
overhanging her was the collar of forest about the cone, and the
ever-faithful snow-white cloud that only left the brow of Nevis to
creep down and embrace her by night. She took off her bonnet and
wished as she had rarely done before that she might never leave this
warm fragrant poetic land. It was made for such as she, whose whole
nature was tuned to poetry and romance, even if denied the gift of
expression--or of consummation! Why should she not remain here? She
had some money, quite enough to rent or even build a little house in
one of these high solitudes, where she could always look from her
window and see the sapphire sea, that so marvellously changed to
chrysoprase near the silver palm-fringed shore, inhale