She was awakened by the dinner gong, booming loudly on the terrace; her predilection for the woods about the crater was an old story. She sat up with a yawn and a naughty face. Such good things she had eaten at Government House last night, and even her strong little teeth were weary of fibrous cattle killed only when too old and feeble to do the work of the infrequent horse. She detested even the Sunday chicken, invitingly brown without but as tough as the cows within, so recent her exit from the court of much repose. That chicken! No West Indian ever forgets her. She looks alive and full of pride, as, with her gizzard tucked under her left wing, she is carried high but mincingly down the dining room to the head of the table by a yellow wench or superannuated butler. When a venerable cock is sacrificed, he is boiled as a tribute to the doughtiness of his sex, but the more abundant ladies of the harem are given a brown and burnished shroud, deceitful to the last.

Butter, Julia had rarely tasted; milk was almost as scarce; but she would have been quite willing to live on the delicious fruits and vegetables of the Indies, bread and coffee. Her mother, however, forced her to eat meat once a day, hoping to check the anÆmia inevitable in the tropics.

Mrs. Edis, kind as she ever was to the one creature that had found the soft spot in her heart, did not like to be kept waiting, and Julia, pinning up her untidy hair as she ran, was in the dining-room before the gong had ceased to echo. Like the other rooms of Great House, and the older mansions of the West Indies in general, this was very large and very bare, although the sideboard, table, and chairs were of mahogany. Only two of the ancestral portraits hung on the whitewashed walls, John and Mary Fawcett; the grandparents, also, of one Alexander Hamilton, who had unaccountably become something or other in the United States of America, instead of serving his mother country. Mrs. Edis disapproved of his conduct, and rarely alluded to him, but Julia sometimes haunted the ruin of the house down near the shore, where he was supposed to have come to light, and would have liked to know more of him. There was an old print of him in the garret (her grandfather, it seemed, had admired him), and she liked his sparkling eyes and human mouth. A photograph of her brother Fawcett, taken some years ago in London, was not unlike, although the charming mouth had always been weaker; but now—and this was Julia’s only trouble—he was quite dreadful to look at, and came seldom to Great House. When he did, there were terrible scenes; Julia, much as she loved him, ran to the forest the moment she heard his voice.

Mrs. Edis was already at the head of the table, and for the moment took no notice of her daughter; her expression was still introspective, her face almost visibly veiled. Julia made a grimace at the dish of meat handed her by the servant.

“This is poor old Abraham, I suppose,” she remarked, with more flippancy than her austere mother and her elderly governesses had encouraged. “I shall feel like a cannibal. I’ve ridden on his back and talked to him when I’ve had nobody else. Well, he’ll have his revenge!”

Mrs. Edis suddenly emerged from the veil. She looked hard, practical, incisive.

“Soon you will no longer be obliged to eat these old servants of the field,” she announced. “Your island days are over.”

Julia dropped both knife and fork with a clatter. “Are we going to England to live? Oh, mother! Shall I see England? The queen? All the dear little princes and princesses? Are they the least bit like Fanny?”

“Not at all, nor like any other children,” replied the old royalist, who had dined at the queen’s table in her youth. “No, I probably shall never see England again. Nor do I desire to do so. The queen is old and so am I. Moreover, judging from your Aunt Maria’s letters, and her edifying discourse upon the rare occasions when she honors us with a visit, London must be sadly changed. The majestic simplicity of my day has vanished, and an extravagance in dress and living, an insane rush for excitement and pleasure, have taken its place. There are railways built beneath the earth, gorging and disgorging men like ant-hills. Women think of nothing but Paris clothes, no longer of their duty as wives and mothers. But although this would disturb and bewilder me, with you it will be different. Youth can adapt itself—”

“But when am I going, and with whom?” shrieked Julia. “Has Aunt Maria sent for me?”

“Not she. She has never spent a penny on any one but herself. She lives to be smart, and is the silliest woman I have ever known. And that is saying a good deal, for they are all silly—”

“But me—I—when—do explain, dear mother!”

Mrs. Edis paused a moment and then fixed her powerful little eyes on the eager innocent ones opposite. “Could you not see last night that Lieutenant France had fallen in love with you?” she asked.

“That horrid old thing! Why, he is nothing but a dancer. You don’t mean to say that I must marry him?” and Julia, for the first time since her childhood, and without in the least knowing why, burst into a storm of tears.

“I won’t marry him,” she sobbed. “I won’t.”

Mrs. Edis waited until she was calm, then, having disposed of a square of tissue as old, relatively, as her own, continued, “It is I that should weep, for I am to lose you and it will be very lonely here. But that is neither here nor there. When the time comes we all fulfil our destiny. Your time has come to marry, and take your first step upon the brilliant career which awaits you.”

“Please wait till the next squadron,” sobbed Julia. “The planets may have made a mistake—”

This remark was unworthy of notice.

“I hate the planets.”

Mrs. Edis applied a sharp knife and an upright indomitable fork to another fragment of Abraham.

Julia, feeling no match for the combined forces of the heavens and her mother, dried her eyes.

“Has he a castle?”

“He will have.”

“And many books?”

“England is full of libraries, the greatest in the world.”

“Will Aunt Maria take me to parties?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Will he find the Prince for me?”

“The what?”

“Well, I don’t mean a real prince, but a young man that I could love.”

“Certainly not! You will love your husband.”

“But he is old enough to be my father.”

“He is only forty.”

“I am only eighteen. When I am forty I could have a grandchild.”

“Nonsense. Husbands should always be older than their wives. They are then ready to settle down, and are capable of advising giddy young things like yourself. You may not feel any silly romantic love for him—I sincerely hope that you will not—but you will be a faithful and devoted wife, and as obedient to him as you have been to me.”

“I don’t mind obeying him if he is as dear as you are. Maybe he is, for you looked so much sterner than all the other mothers last night, and I am sure that not one of them is so kind. Has he some babies?”

“What?” Mrs. Edis almost dropped her fork.

“I’d like a few. Fanny is such a darling. I liked him less than any of the men I danced with, but if he has a castle, and would bring me to see you every year, and would let me run about as you do, and read a lot of books, and give me a lot of babies, I shouldn’t mind him so much.”

Mrs. Edis turned cold. For the first time she recognized the abysmal depths of her daughter’s ignorance. It was a subject to which she had never, indeed, given a thought. A governess had always been at the child’s heels. Julia had been brought up as she had been brought up herself, and she belonged to the school of dames to whom the enlightenment of youth was a monstrous indelicacy. Moreover, she was old enough to look back upon the material side of marriage as an automatic submission to the race. Women had a certain destiny to fulfil, and the whole matter should be dismissed at that. Nevertheless, as she looked at that personification of delicate and trusting innocence, she felt a sudden and violent hatred of men, a keen longing that this perfect flower could go to her high destiny undefiled, and regret that she must not only travel the appointed road, but set out unprepared. She dimly recalled her own wedding and that she had hated her husband until kindly Time had made him one of the facts of existence. To warn the child was beyond her, but she made up her mind to postpone the ultimate moment as long as possible.

“You will have everything you want,” she said. “And as he cannot obtain leave of absence while away on duty, you will merely become engaged to him—no—” she remembered her planets; “you are to marry at once, but you will go to England by the Royal Mail, and have ample time to become accustomed to the change. Mrs. Higgins is going to England very shortly. She will take you, and if Mr. France is not there—his squadron goes to South America—you can stay with Maria until he arrives. That will give you time to buy some pretty clothes, and become accustomed to the idea of your—new position in life.”

“Will my clothes come from Paris?”

“No doubt. I have a hundred pounds in the bank and you are welcome to them.”

“A hundred pounds! I shall have a hundred frocks, one of every color that will go with my hair, and the rest white.”

“Not quite.” Mrs. Edis had but a faint appreciation of the cost of modern clothes, but she thought it best to begin at once to curb her daughter’s imagination. “It will buy you eight or ten, and no doubt your husband will give you more. But even if he has not as large an income now as he will have later, you have an instinct for dress. Your frock was the simplest at Government House last night, but I noticed that you had adjusted it, and your ribbons, with an air that made it look quite the smartest in the room. You have distinction and style. The President said so at once. You will make a little money go far.”

Julia stared at her mother. It was the first time she had heard her pay a compliment to any one. But she liked it and opened her eyes ingenuously for more. Mrs. Edis laughed, a rare relaxation of those hard muscles under the parchment skin. “Go and comb your hair,” she said, “and make yourself as pretty as possible. Lieutenant France is coming to call this afternoon, and if he does not ask for your hand to-day, he will to-morrow.”

“What shall I do with him? We can’t dance. And I couldn’t think of a thing to say to him last night. I could to some of the young men.”

“The less you say, the better! I will entertain him.”

Tears had threatened again, but they retreated at the prospect of deliverance from an ordeal as formidable as matrimony. “Mother!” she exclaimed suddenly. “Why don’t you marry him?”

“I?”

“Yes. He’ll be like my father, anyhow, and then I should not only have you still, but you could always talk to him—”

“Run and do your hair.”