Dr Whitaker turned with her silently along the path, and uttered not a word till they reached the marble seat at the end of the creeper-covered balustrade. Then he sat down moodily beside her, and said in what seemed a perfectly unruffled voice: ‘Miss Dupuy, I am not altogether sorry that this little incident has turned out just as it has happened. It enables you to judge for yourself the sort of insult that men of my colour are liable to meet with here in Trinidad.’ Nora fingered her fan nervously. ‘Tom Dupuy’s always an unendurably rude fellow,’ she said, with affected carelessness. ‘He’s rude by nature, you know, that’s the fact of it. He’s rude to me. He’s rude to everybody. He’s a boor, Dr Whitaker; a boor at heart. You mustn’t take any notice of what he says to you.’ ‘Yes; he _is_ a boor, Miss Dupuy—and I shall venture to say so, although he’s your own cousin—but in what other country in the world would such a boor venture to believe himself able to look down upon other men, his equals in everything except an accident of colour?’ ‘Oh, Dr Whitaker, you make too much altogether of his rudeness. It isn’t personal to you; it’s part of his nature.’ ‘Miss Dupuy,’ the young mulatto burst out suddenly, after a moment’s pause and internal struggle, ‘I’m not sorry for it, as I said before; for it gives me the opportunity of saying something to you that I have long been waiting to tell you.’ ‘Well?’—frigidly. ‘Well, it is this: I mean at once to leave Trinidad.’ Nora started. It was not quite what she was expecting. ‘To leave Trinidad, Dr Whitaker? And where to go? Back to England?’ ‘Yes, back to England.—Miss Dupuy, for heaven’s sake, listen to me for a moment. This dance won’t be very long. As soon as it’s over, I must take you back to the ballroom. I have only these few short minutes to speak to you. I have been waiting long for them—looking forward to them; hoping for them; dreading them; foreseeing them. Don’t disappoint me of my one chance of a hearing. Sit here and hear me out: I beg of you—I implore you.’ Nora’s fingers trembled terribly, and she felt half inclined to rise at once and go back to Mrs Pereira; but she could not find it in her heart utterly to refuse that pleading tone of profound emotion, even though it came from only a brown man. ‘Well, Dr Whitaker,’ she answered tremulously, ‘say on whatever you have to say to me.’