these bleached people of the North, whose faces, virtuous as they were, would have seemed to the dead woman to shed the malignant aura of Levine’s,—­and the boy for whom the sacrificial body had been laid on the altar.  He paid his debt in wretchedness then and there, and stood by the black pall which covered his mother, feeling a hundred years older than the brother who sat demurely on Mrs. Lytton’s agitated lap.

When Mr. Goodchild closed his book, the slave women entered with silver pitchers containing mulled wines, porter mixed with sugar and spice, madeira, and port wine.  Heaped high on silver salvers were pastries and “dyer bread,” wrapped in white paper sealed with black wax.  The guests refreshed themselves deeply, then followed the coffin, which was borne on the shoulders of the dead woman’s brothers and their closest friends, across the valley to the private burying-ground of the Lyttons.  Old James Lytton was placed beside her in the following year, and ten years later a child of Christiana Huggins, the wife of his son.  The cane grows above their graves to-day.

VI

Alexander went home with Mrs. Mitchell, and it was long before he returned to Peter Lytton’s.  His favourite aunt was delighted to get him, and her husband, for whom Alexander had no love, was shortly to sail on one of his frequent voyages.

Mrs. Mitchell had a winter home in Christianstadt, for she loved the gay life of the little capital, and her large house, on the corner of King and Strand streets, was opened almost as often as Government House.  This pile, with its imposing facade, represented to her the fulfilment of worldly ambitions and splendour.  There was nothing to compare with it on Nevis or St. Kitts, nor yet on St. Thomas; and her imagination or memory gave her nothing in Europe to rival it.  When Government House was closed she felt as if the world were eating bread and cheese.  The Danes were not only the easiest and most generous of rulers, but they entertained with a royal contempt of pieces of eight, and their adopted children had neither the excuse nor the desire to return to their native isles.

Christianstadt, although rising straight from the harbour, has the picturesque effect of a high mountain-village.  As the road across the Island finds its termination in King Street, the perceptible decline and the surrounding hills, curving in a crescent to the unseen shore a mile away, create the illusion.  On the left the town straggles away in an irregular quarter for the poor, set thick with groves of cocoanut and palm.  On the right, and parallel with the main road, is Company Street, and above is the mountain studded with great white stone houses, softened by the lofty roofs of the royal palm.  All along King Street the massive houses stand close together, each with its arcade and its curious outside staircase of stone which leads to an upper balcony where one may catch the breeze and watch the leisures of tropic life.  Almost every house has a court opening into a yard surrounded by the overhanging balconies of three sides of the building; and here the guinea fowl screech their matins, the roosters crow all night, there is always a negro asleep under a cocoanut tree, and a flame of colour from potted plants.