t, 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.

Girls mature very early in the tropics, and at fourteen Rachael Fawcett
was the unresponsive toast from Basseterre to Sandy Point. Her height
was considerable, and she had the round supple figure of a girl who has
lived the out-door life in moderation; full of strength and grace, and
no exaggeration of muscle. She had a fine mane of reddish fair hair, a
pair of sparkling eager gray eyes which could go black with passion or
even excited interest, a long nose so sensitively cut that she could
express any mood she chose with her nostrils, which expanded quite
alarmingly when she flew into a temper, and a full well-cut mouth. Her
skin had the whiteness and transparency peculiar to the women of St.
Kitts and Nevis; her head and brow were nobly modelled, and the former
she carried high to the day of her death. It was set so far back on her
shoulders and on a line so straight that it would look haughty in her
coffin. What wonder that the young planters besieged her gates, that her
aspirations soared high, that Mary Fawcett dreamed of a great destiny
for this worshipped child of her old age? As for the young planters,
they never got beyond the gates, for a dragon stood there. Mistress
Fawcett had no mind to run the risk of early entanglements. When Rachael