Strange to say, too, Lady Noel herself was not by any means so dark as her son Harry. The Lincolnshire Noels belonged themselves to the black-haired type so common in their county; and the union of the two strains had produced in Harry a complexion several degrees more swarthy than that of either of his handsome parents. In England, nobody would ever have noticed this little peculiarity; they merely said that Harry was the very image of the old Noel family portraits; but in Trinidad, where the abiding traces of negro blood are so familiarly known and so carefully looked for, it was almost impossible for him to pass a single day without his partially black descent being immediately suspected. He had ‘thrown back,’ as the colonists coarsely phrase it, to the dusky complexion of his quadroon ancestors. Louis Delgado hugged himself and grinned at this glorious discovery. ‘Ha, ha!’ he cried, rocking himself rapidly to and fro in a perfect frenzy of gratified vindictiveness; ‘him doan’t buckra, den!—him doan’t buckra! He hold himself so proud, an’ look down on naygur; an’ after all, him doan’t buckra, him only brown man! De Lard be praise, I gwine to humble him! I gwine to let him know him doan’t buckra!’ ‘You will tell him?’ Rosina Fleming asked curiously. Delgado danced about the hut in a wild ecstasy, with his fingers snapping about in every direction, like the half-tamed African savage that he really was. ‘Tell _him_, Missy Rosie!’ he echoed contemptuously—‘tell _him_, you sayin’ to me! Yah, yah! you hab no sense, missy. I doan’t gwine to tell _him_, for certain; I gwine to tell dat cheatin’ scoundrel, Tom Dupuy, missy, so humble him in de end de wuss for all dat.’ Rosina gazed at him in puzzled bewilderment. ‘Tom Dupuy!’ she repeated slowly. ‘You gwine to tell Tom Dupuy, you say, Mistah Delgado! What de debbel de use, I wonder, sah, ob tell Tom Dupuy dat de buckra gentleman an’ Isaac is own cousin?’ Delgado executed another frantic _pas de seul_ across the floor of the hut, to work off his mad excitement, and then answered gleefully: ‘Ha, ha, Missy Rosie, you is woman, you is creole naygur gal—you doan’t understan’ de depth an’ de wisdom ob African naygur. Look you here, me fren’, I explain you all about it. De missy up at house, him fall in lub wit dis brown man, Noel. Tom Dupuy, him want for go an’ marry de missy. Dat make Tom Dupuy hate de brown man. I tell him, Noel doan’t no buckra—him common brown man, own cousin to Isaac Pourtalès. Den Tom Dupuy laugh at Noel! Ha, ha! I turn de hand ob one proud buckra to bring down de pride ob de odder!’ Isaac Pourtalès laughed too. ‘Ha, ha!’ he cried, ‘him is proud buckra, an’ him is me own cousin! I hate him!’