They rode on without another word till they reached the house; there, they found Nora and Harry had arrived before them, and had gone in to dress for dinner. Mr Dupuy followed their example; but Tom, who had made up his mind suddenly to stop, loitered about on the lawn under the big star-apple tree, waiting in the cool till the young Englishman should make his appearance. Meanwhile, Nora, in her own dressing-room, attended by Rosina Fleming and Aunt Clemmy, was thinking over the afternoon’s ride very much to her own satisfaction. Mr Noel was really after all a very nice fellow: if he hadn’t been so dreadfully dark—but there, he was really just one shade too dusky in the face ever to please a West Indian fancy. And yet, he was certainly very much in love with her! The very persistence with which he avoided reopening the subject, while he went on paying her such very marked attention, showed in itself how thoroughly in earnest he was. ‘He’ll propose to me again to-morrow—I’m quite sure he will,’ Nora thought to herself, as Rosina fastened up her hair with a sprig of plumbago and a little delicate spray of wild maiden-hair. ‘He was almost going to propose to me as we came along by the mountain-cabbages this afternoon, only I saw him hesitating, and I turned the current of the conversation. I wonder why I turned it? I’m sure I don’t know why. I wonder whether it was because I didn’t know whether I should answer “Yes” or “No,” if he were really to ask me? I think one ought to decide in one’s own mind beforehand what one’s going to say in such a case, especially when a man has asked one already. He’s awfully nice. I wish he was just a shade or two lighter. I believe Tom really fancies—he’s so dark—it isn’t quite right with him.’ Isaac Pourtalès, lounging about that minute, watching for Rosina, whom he had come to talk with, saw Nora flit for a second past the open window of the passage, in her light and gauze-like evening dress, with open neck in front, and the flowers twined in her pretty hair; and he said to himself as he glanced up at her: ‘De word ob de Lard say right, “Take captive de women!”’ At the same moment, Tom Dupuy, strolling idly on the lawn in the thickening twilight, caught sight of Pourtalès, and beckoned him towards him with an imperious finger. ‘Come here,’ he said; ‘I want to talk with you, you nigger there.—You’re Isaac Pourtalès, aren’t you?—I thought so. Then come and tell me all you know about this confounded cousin of yours—this man Noel.’