Through the midst of the ravine, the little river from which the estate took its Spanish name—curiously corrupted upon negro lips into the form of Wagwater—tumbled in white sheets of dashing foam between the green foliage ‘in cataract after cataract to the sea.’ Here and there, the overarching clumps of feathery bamboo hid its course for a hundred yards or so, as seen from the piazza; but every now and again it gleamed forth, white and conspicuous once more, as it tumbled headlong down its steep course over some rocky barrier. You could trace it throughout like a long line of light among all the tangled, glossy, dark-green foliage of that wild and overgrown tropical gully. The Honourable James Hawthorn, owner of Agualta, was sitting out in a cane armchair, under the broad shadow of the great mango-tree on the grassy terrace in front of the piazza. A venerable gray-haired, gray-bearded man, with a calm, clear-cut, resolute face, the very counterpart of his son Edward’s, only grown some thirty years older, and sterner too, and more unbending. ‘Mr Dupuy’s coming round this morning, Mary,’ Mr Hawthorn said to the placid, gentle, old lady in the companion-chair beside him. ‘He wants to look at some oxen I’m going to get rid of, and he thinks, perhaps, he’d like to buy them.’ ‘Mr Dupuy!’ Mrs Hawthorn answered, with a slight shudder of displeasure as she spoke. ‘I really wish he wasn’t coming. I can’t bear that man, somehow. He always seems to me the worst embodiment of the bad old days that are dead and gone, Jamie.’ The old gentleman hummed an air to himself reflectively. ‘We mustn’t be too hard upon him, my dear,’ he said after a moment’s pause, in a tone of perfect resignation. ‘They were brought up in a terrible school, those old-time slavery Trinidad folk, and they can’t help bearing the impress of a bad system upon them to the very last moment of their existence. I think so meanly of them for their pride and intolerance, that I take care not to imitate it. You remember what Shelley says: “Let scorn be not repaid with scorn.” That’s how I always feel, Mary, towards Mr Dupuy and all his fellows.’ Mrs Hawthorn bit her lip as she answered slowly: ‘All the same, Jamie, I wish he wasn’t coming here this morning; and this the English mail-day too! We shall get our letter from Edward by-and-by, you know, dear. I hate to have these people coming breaking in upon us the very day we want to be at home by ourselves, to have a quiet hour alone with our dear boy over in England.’