"Foolish boy; you would lose your way and be destroyed. There are steep rocks, covered by creeping plants, so thick and luxuriant, that they would take you up to the neck, and these jungles are full of snakes and fortylegs as large as one's hand, and their bite is dreadful. I think we have had enough of reptiles to-night! Then there are deep gullies rent by earthquakes, full of slime, dwarf mangroves, wild cucumbers, and other weeds, as tall as a man; and there lurk in the thickets runaway negroes and others who are worse; but all bad enough for a solitary stranger to encounter; and then there will be the rain and the wind and the lightning; and for all these you would leave my pleasant little drawing-room, and—and——"
"And your society, you would say reproachfully."
"Precisely so. Ah, you know not a midnight storm in the Antilles."
"The night certainly is very dark," said I, beginning to yield to her arguments and beauty.
"Yes; as a French writer says, 'it is one of those nights which are too dark for murder—too dark even for love!'"
"Is it ungallant to say, I am thinking of neither?" said I, laughing, while my cheek flushed as this singular woman placed her white hand gently on mine, as if more fully to persuade me; "but why that thought?"
"'Tis very natural: darkness makes one think of love, does it not?"
"To me, it would rather be suggestive of danger. For love, I would rather have moonlight."
"But not in the tropics where the moon is like a second sun. But you must not leave me, monsieur, on such a night, and in this place which is so solitary. I have not been used to dwell alone."
"No one lives here with you?"