“Very well,” said the Marquise, decidedly, returning his black book to her overseer, and observing to Cerise, who was by this time in tears, “A case, my dear, that it would be most injudicious to pardon. After all, the pain is not much, and the disgrace, you know, to these sort of people is nothing!” CHAPTER XXXI BLACK, BUT COMELY Transplanted, like some delicate flower from her native soil, to this glowing West Indian Island, Mademoiselle de Montmirail had lost but little of the freshness that bloomed in the Norman convent, and had gained a more decided colouring and a deeper expression, which added the one womanly grace hitherto wanting in her beauty. Even the negroes, chattering to one another as they hoed between the cane-rows, grinned out their approval of her beauty, and Hippolyte, a gigantic and hideous Coromantee, imported from Africa, had been good enough to express his opinion that she only wanted a little more colour, as he called it, meaning a shade of yellow in her skin, to be handsome enough for his wife; whereat his audience shouted and showed their white teeth, wagging their woolly heads applauding, while the savage shook his great black shoulders, and looked as if he thought more unlikely events might come to pass. Had it not been for these very slaves, who gave their opinions so freely on her personal appearance, Cerise would have been tolerably happy. She was, indeed, far from the scenes that were most endeared to her by memory and association. She was very uncertain when or how she should return to France, and until she returned, there was apparently no hope, however remote, that she could realise a certain dream which now constituted the charm of her whole life. Still the dream had been dreamed, vague, romantic, wild, and visionary; yet the girl dwelt upon it day by day, with a tenderness and a constancy the deeper and the more enduring that they seemed so hopeless and so thrown away. I would not have it supposed, however, that Mademoiselle de Montmirail was a foolish love-sick maiden, who allowed her fancies to become the daily business of her life. On the contrary, she went through her duties scrupulously, making for herself occupation where she did not find it, helping her mother, working, reading, playing, improving her mind, and doing all she could for the negroes on the estate, but tinging everything unconsciously, whether of joy or sorrow, trouble or pleasure, with the rosy light of a love she had conceived without reason, cherished without reflection, and now brooded over without hope, in the depths of her own heart.