Sestrina fled. In a moment she had run along the corridor. Entering her room she had begun to cry. For a long time she could think of nothing else but the terrible expression which she had seen on her father’s face. After a while her heart ceased to thump, and her thoughts strayed into more pleasant channels. She began to think of the young Englishman. “Oh, if only I could fly from here with him, elope just as I have read folks do,” she murmured to herself as she rose and stared at her image in the large mirror. Then she turned away and pushed the settee against the door. Of late she had been very nervous at night, and this nervousness was due to her father’s strange madness, which was becoming worse of late. “What does it all mean? Why does he want me to go to the mountains with him? Is not Père Chaco, the Catholic priest, a good man? Did he not bless me with holy water and say beautiful things about the world? And yet he flung me from him, yes, only a week before, and raved like a madman when I refused to leave holy Père Chaco, and go away into the mountains to pray before strange priests.”
As Sestrina mused on, she began to remove her picturesque attire; first she cast aside the loose _sarong_; then she loosened her under-bodice. Her hair fell in confusion down to her shoulders, tumbling in shining ripples about her bosom, that was the whiter for being untouched by the hot rays of the tropical sunlight. She was fast leaving her girlhood behind; her footsteps, so to speak, were already on the threshold of womanhood, the rose of beauty and innocence on her lips and shining in her eyes. She half forgot the horror of her father’s distorted face as she gazed at her image in the mirror. Though her mind was naturally refined, the romantic passion of her Southern ancestry began to sigh in its sleep; and Sestrina’s lips echoed the sigh, though she knew not why they did so. She thought of the handsome Englishman, and of the sweet things he had whispered into her ears. She thought of the rapture of love, of the meeting of lips, and the romantic sorrows of parted lovers, and all those things which had influenced her mind as she poured over her French novels. “Ah me!” she sighed, then a startled look leapt into her eyes. She looked towards the window in fright. It was only the “Too-whoo-hee!” of the blue-winged Haytian owl that watched her from its perch in the mahogany tree just outside. She opened the vine-clad, latticed casement wide, and then stared out on the loveliness of the tropic night. She could just see the dark, palm-clad slopes of the mountains, faintly outlined by the moon’s pale light. “Ah, if he were only here, how happy I should be!” she murmured as she watched the swarms of fireflies dancing in the glooms of the bamboos, and then looked across the plains where she could see the twinkling lights of the homesteads near Gonaives. After that, she opened a little door that divided her chamber from another small room. It was where Claircine, the negress, slept.