Three or four months rolled rapidly away, and the Hawthorns began to feel themselves settling down quietly to their new, strange, and anomalous position in the island of Trinidad. In spite of her father’s prohibition, Nora often came around to visit them; and though Mr Dupuy fought hard against her continuing ‘that undesirable acquaintance,’ he soon found that Nora, too, had a will of her own, and that she was not to be restrained from anything on which she had once set her mind, by such very simple and easy means as mere prohibition. ‘The girl’s a Dupuy to the backbone,’ her cousin Tom said to her father more than once, in evident admiration. ‘Though she does take up with a lot of coloured trash—which, of course, is very unladylike—when once she sets her heart upon a thing sir, she does it too, and no mistake about it either.’ Dr Whitaker was another not infrequent visitor at the Hawthorns’ bungalow. He had picked up, as he desired, a gratuitous practice among the poorer negroes; and though it often sorely tried his patience and enthusiasm, he found in it at least some relief and respite from the perpetual annoyance and degradation of his uncongenial home-life with his father and Miss Euphemia. His botany, too, gave him another anodyne—something to do to take his mind off the endless incongruity of his settled position. He had decided within himself, almost from the very first day of landing, to undertake a Flora of Trinidad—a new work on all the flower-plants in the rich vegetation of that most luxuriant among tropical islands; and in every minute of leisure time that he could spare from the thankless care of his poor negro patients, he was hard at work among the tangled woods and jungle undergrowth, or else in his own little study at home, in his father’s house, collecting, arranging, and comparing the materials for this his great work on the exquisite flowers of his native country. The faithful violin afforded him his third great resource and alleviation. Though Miss Euphemia and her lively friends were scarcely of a sort to appreciate the young doctor’s touching and delicate execution, he practised by himself for an hour or two in his own rooms every evening; and as he did so, he felt that the strings seemed ever to re-echo with one sweet and oft-recurring name—the name of Nora. To be sure, he was a brown man, but even brown men are more or less human. How could he ever dream of falling in love with one of Miss Euphemia’s like-minded companions?