ew into a rage,--for under the buoyancy of her own had always been
a certain melancholy. Before his birth she had gone to the extremes of
happiness and grief, her normal relation to life almost forgotten. But
the sharpened nerves of the child manifested themselves in acute
sensibilities and an extraordinary precocity of intellect, never in
morbid or irritable moods. He was excitable, and had a high and
sometimes furious temper, but even his habit of study never extinguished
his gay and lively spirits. On the other hand, beneath the surface
sparkle of his mind was a British ruggedness and tenacity, and a
stubborn oneness of purpose, whatever might be the object, with which no
lighter mood interfered. All this Rachael lived long enough to discover
and find compensation in, and as she mastered the duties of her new life
she companioned the boy more and more. James was a good but
uninteresting baby, who made few demands upon her, and was satisfied
with his nurse. She never pretended to herself that she loved him as she
did Alexander, for aside from the personality of her first-born, he was
the symbol and manifest of her deepest living.

Although Rachael was monotonously conscious of the iron that had impaled
her soul, she was not quite unhappy at this time, and she never ceased
to love Hamilton. Whatever his lacks and failures, nothing could destroy
his fascination as a man. His love for her, although tranquillized by
time, was still strong enough to keep alive his desire' to please her,
and he thought of her as his wife always. He felt the change in her, and
his soul rebelled bitterly at the destruction of his pedestal and halo,
and all that fiction had meant to both of them; but he respected her
reserve, and the subject never came up between them. He knew that she
never would love any one else, that she still loved him passionately,
despite the shattered ideal of him; and he consoled himself with the
reflection that even in giving him less than her entire store, she gave
him, merely by being herself, more than he had thought to find in any
woman. His courteous attentions to her had never relaxed, and in time
the old companionship was resumed; they read and discussed as in their
other home; but this their little circle was widened by two, Alexander
and Hugh Knox. The uninterrupted intimacy of their first years was not
to be resumed.

They saw little of the society of St. Croix. In 1763 Christiana Huggins,
visiting the Pet