Next morning very early Marie made her way to the Rue Victor Hugo, received her tray of goods, and started on her journey. It was a long journey to-day, right away to Grande Anse on the eastern side of the island.

She passed up the steep twilit streets, up, up, past the Rue Petit Versailles, till the houses broke up and the way began to turn from a street to a country road.

Just here she did what she had never done before, turned and looked down at the city steeped in twilight.

With the heavy load of the tray she dared not bend her head. She stood with head erect and eyes cast down, beautiful and statuesque as one of the Greek Caniphori. She was thinking, “Ah, there is someone there, in what house is he, in which street, is he awake yet or does he still sleep?”

Then, raising her eyes, she looked far over the sea, bright beyond the shadow of Pelée and the hills. She was thinking, “He came from there—where from beyond that wonderful bright sea did he come?” The sea had always been one of the mysteries of her life, and the ships that came from away beyond the horizon.

Then she turned and resumed her way along the twilit road filled with the early morning scent of tropical woods and flowers, she had forgotten her fear of the fer de lance. Zombis and evil shapes had vanished from her path—those shadows of the mind that have no existence when forgotten.

140 Yesterday, when she was leaving the market, she had heard the screams of the market-women and had turned to see him surrounded with people. He had killed the fer de lance with his naked hand; snakes could do him no harm, so the market people had said. That fact made the fer de lance less fearful to her. He did not fear it, why should she? In this tropical mind, sealed so long to love, Love had suddenly disclosed himself full grown and statuesque.

It was as though in a tropical garden gone to a state of nature, some wind had pushed the foliage aside revealing the marble form of the garden god, the statue that had been there since the garden was planted first, lurking amidst the leaves, and now seen for the first time. As she turned the shadow of Pelée, the sunlight struck her, and the view lay spread as of old. The wonderful view of Martinique, its hills, and mountains, its fields of cane, and visions of distant sea.

She paused, as she always paused just here, to feel the trade wind and the warmth of the sun. There lay the mountains she had known from childhood with La Trace, the white highroad, winding away across them, the mornes, the valleys, the glimpse of the distant sea towards Fort de France. It seemed to her that she was looking at all this for the first time. The world, since yesterday, had become new, a spirit, half gay, half sad, had infused itself into everything, the hills, the sea, the distance—the world, since yesterday, would never be the same again to Marie of Morne Rouge.

The last time she had passed along that road, she had travelled without thought, careless as a child, free as a bird—now it was all different. She could not tell in the least what had happened to her, she never connected the change with love, the thing Finotte and Pauline chattered about so141 glibly. She only knew that the great old hills were speaking a new language to her and that Distance had become Loneliness.

She had travelled the white highroad many a time alone, yet she had never felt herself alone till to-day.

Then, as she went on her way along the road blazing in the sun and set on either side with palmistes, tree ferns, bushes of grenadilla blossom and sun-stricken tamarinds, a voice said to her:

“Bonjour, mademoiselle.”

There was no one but herself upon ............