I hardly heard him. I was too busy watching the various family groups as we went through the villages. It was all so incongruous: here, a marvellous house that might have belonged to some foreign Prince--there, huddled at its very gate, a cluster of huts, thatched, and sun-baked; and brown babies all over the landscape, very naked, very dirty and, from a distance at least, wholly enchanting. And then the trees! The tall, royal palms, with the afternoon wind in them! "Oh-h!" I said, as we passed a clump of wonderful scarlet blossoms, "what is it?" Sarah was exclaiming too, sitting perfectly upright and rigid beside me. "Hibiscus," answered our companion. "You'll find lots of it where we are going." The villages went by. A crimson sun was glowing over the palms, and almost before I had seen it, it was gone, and a violet after-glow was coloring distant hilltops. I clasped my hands in my lap and wondered if ever there had been anything as lovely and remote. And it was with a sense of absolute shock that I heard and saw Silas snap on the lights of the car and realized that now the after-glow had gone and that the heavy Southern night had closed in around us. "Why, there isn't any twilight," I said, in childish disappointment. "Not here," answered my husband, "Nature strikes suddenly and swiftly in the tropics. She has no halftones, no compromise...." Even in the dark I could feel his glance at me. I said nothing. When we entered the village of Guayabal and drove up the winding roadway through the gates and into the drive, the stars were shining. Very close they seemed, and tremendous--"as big as dinner plates," as Sarah put it to me afterwards, with obvious disapproval. And they were warm, almost fragrant, I fancied, unlike our cold, high, impersonal stars of the North. They frightened me.... The lights shone out from a low, long house as the car stopped under a portico. Two smiling Chinese housemen were standing, ready to take our bags, and my heart sank as I thought of what Sarah--who contributes so religiously to foreign missions--must be thinking. It was with relief, therefore, that I saw the unmistakable Hibernian face of the cook at the door. The domestic staff consisted then, of Wing and Fong and Norah; and I blessed the Reynolds, that, in assembling their household Lares and Penates, they had included something white and clean and very cordial to preside over the kitchen, for I feared for Sarah's peace of mind.... Peter, tired and perhaps somewhat frightened by the strangeness and by the yellow hands raised to lift him down from the car, whimpered a little, and my husband, jumping out, took the child in his arms and turned to me, "Welcome," he said, with a certain dignity, "to the Palms."