As Mr Dupuy got better, one firm resolve seemed to have imprinted itself indelibly upon his unbending nature—the resolve to quit Trinidad for ever at the very earliest moment, when convalescence and Macfarlane would combine to allow him. He would even sell Orange Grove itself, he said, and go over and live permanently for the rest of his days in England. ‘That is to say, in England for the summer,’ he observed casually to Nora; ‘for I don’t suppose any human being in his right senses would ever dream of stopping in such a wretched climate through a whole dreary English winter. In October, I shall always go to Nice, or Pau, or Mentone, or some other of these new-fashioned continental wintering-places that people go to nowadays in Europe; some chance, I suppose, of seeing the sun once and again there, at anyrate. But one thing I’ve quite decided upon: I won’t live any longer in Trinidad. I’m not afraid; but I object on principle to vivisection, especially conducted with a blunt instrument. At my time of life, a man naturally dislikes being cut up alive by those horrible cutlasses. You and your cousin Tom may stop here by yourselves and manage Pimento Valley, if you choose; but I decline any longer to be used as the _corpus vile_ for a nigger experimentalist to exercise his skill upon. It doesn’t suit my taste, and I refuse to submit to it. The fact is, Nora, my dear, the island isn’t any longer a fit place for a gentleman to live in. It was all very well in the old days, before we got a pack of Exeter Hall demagogues, sent out here by the government of the day on purpose to excite our own servants to rebellion and insurrection against us. Nobody ever heard of the niggers rising or hacking one to pieces bodily in those days. But ever since this man Hawthorn, whose wife you’re so thick with—a thing that no lady would have dreamt of countenancing in the days before these new-fangled doctrines came into fashion—ever since this man Hawthorn was sent out here, preaching his revolutionary cut-throat principles broadcast, the island hasn’t been a fit place at all for a gentleman to live in; and I’ve made up my mind to leave it at once and go over to England.’