Mr Dupuy never quite understood how he managed to reel out of the governor’s drawing-room without fainting, from sheer astonishment and horror; or how he managed to restrain his legs from lifting up his toes automatically against the sacred person of the Queen’s representative. But he did manage somehow to stagger down the steps in a dazed and stupefied fashion, much as he had staggered along the path when he felt Delgado hacking him about the body at the blazing cane-houses; and he rode back home to Orange Grove, red in the face as an angry turkey-cock, more convinced than ever in his own mind that Trinidad was indeed no longer a fit place for any gentleman of breeding to live in. And in spite of Edward’s having taken passage by the same ship, he determined to clear out of the island, bag and baggage, at the earliest possible opportunity. As for Harry Noel, he, too, had engaged a berth quite undesignedly in the self-same steamer. Even though he had rushed up to Orange Grove in the first flush of the danger to protect Nora and her father, if possible, from the frantic rioters, it had of course been a very awkward position for him to find himself an unwilling and uninvited guest in the house which he had last quitted under such extremely unpleasant circumstances. Mr Dupuy, indeed, though he admitted, when he heard the whole story, that Harry had no doubt behaved ‘like a very decent young fellow,’ could not be prevailed upon to take any notice of his unbidden presence, even by sending an occasional polite message of inquiry about his slow recovery from the adjoining bedroom. So Harry was naturally anxious to get away from Orange Grove as quickly as possible, and he had made up his mind that before he went he would not again ask Nora to reconsider her determination. His chivalrous nature shrank from the very appearance of trading upon her gratitude for his brave efforts to save her on the evening of the outbreak; if she would not accept him for his own sake, she should not accept him for the sake of the risk he had run to win her. The first day when Harry was permitted to move out under the shade of the big star-apple tree upon the little grass plot, where he sat in a cushioned bamboo chair beside the clump of waving cannas, Nora came upon him suddenly, as if by accident, from the Italian terrace, with a bunch of beautiful pale-blue plumbago and a tall spike of scented tuberose in her dainty, gloveless, little fingers. ‘Aren’t they beautiful, Mr Noel?’ she said, holding them up to his admiring gaze—admiring them, it must be confessed, a trifle obliquely. ‘Did you ever in your life see anything so wildly lovely in a stiff, tied-up, staircase conservatory over yonder in dear old England?’ ‘Never,’ Harry Noel answered, with his eyes fixed rather on her blushing face than on the luscious pale white tuberose. ‘I shall carry away with me always the most delightful reminiscences of beautiful Trinidad and of its lovely—flowers.’