MRS. FISKE

CONTENTS

PAGE
BOOK I
Mrs. Edis[1]
BOOK II
Three Potters[39]
BOOK III
Harold France[191]
BOOK IV
Hadji Sadrä[273]
BOOK V
Daniel Tay[361]
BOOK VI
Fanny[453]

BOOK I
MRS. EDIS

I

The entrance of a British cruiser into the harbor of St. Kitts was always followed by a ball at Government House in the little capital of Basse Terre. To-night there was a squadron of three at anchor; therefore was the entertainment offered by the island’s President even more tempting than common, and hospitality had been extended to the officials and distinguished families of the neighboring islands, Nevis, Antigua, and Monserrat. On Nevis there remained but one family of eminence, that great rock having been shorn long since of all but its imperishable beauty.

But Mrs. Edis of “Great House,” an old stone mansion unaffected by time, earthquake, or hurricane, and surrounded by a remnant of one of the oldest estates in the West Indies, was still a personage in spite of her fallen fortunes, and to-night she contributed a young daughter. The introduction of Julia Edis to society had been expected all winter as she was several months past eighteen, and the President had offered her a birthday fête; but Mrs. Edis, with whom no man was so hardy as to argue, had replied that her daughter should enter “the world” at the auspicious moment and not before. This was taken to mean one of two things: either that in good time a squadron would arrive with potential husbands, or (but this, of course, was mere frivolous gossip) when the planets proclaimed the hour of destiny. For more than thirty years Mrs. Edis had been suspected of dabbling in the black arts, incited originally by an old creole from Martinique, grandson of the woman who so accurately cast the horoscope of Josephine. For the last eighteen of these years it had been whispered among the birds in the high palm trees that a not unsimilar destiny awaited Julia Edis.

Therefore, when the word ran round the great ball-room of Government House that the big officer with the heavy mustache and curiously hard, shallow eyes, who had pursued the debutante from the moment she entered with her fearsome mother, was Harold France, heir presumptive to a dukedom, whose present incumbent was sickly and unmarried, the dowager pack (dressed for the most part in the thick old silks and “real lace” of the mid-Victorian period) crystallized the whisper for the first time and condescended to an interest in astrology.