Marianne’s.

In a moment he had managed to put the spell on her, made of himself so to speak a window through which she saw a new world; and the window was Marianne’s, and the new world—by rights, if there are any rights in a matter of that sort.

She laughed as she thought over this matter. The thing was not yet serious with her; the handsome man whom she had admired while he talked to her sister, the man who had kissed her in mistake for her sister, was still a figure at a distance; he had not made himself yet a part of her life. That was to come.

It came with the rapidity which marks the processes of life and death in the warm lands, those terrible pays chauds where a woman is old at twenty-five, a passion full blown in an hour, a corpse corrupt in a day.

Every day Carstairs made his call at the shop. Being in love, he smoked many cigarettes; he called at the same hour and Marianne was there to receive him.

But there were two watchers now. After the fashion of his kind he did not push matters, knowing by instinct exactly the sort of girl he had to deal with. No one could have been more respectful than Carstairs, and at the end of a week when he told Marianne of his love for her he proposed marriage. Though a mate of a ship he had money of his own, not much but enough for him to engage in some business in the island; they would get married when he had made all his arrangements.

She consented but meanwhile, as the engagement was of such a nebulous nature and until the matter was absolutely fixed, she refused his invitations to walk with him of an evening when the band was playing in the square or along those country roads when the moonlight casts the shadows of the palms and makes fairyland of the groves.

Cerise heard it all.

Never in her life before had she spied on any one, or possessed a secret unshared by Marianne; her passion for Carstairs, which had developed pari passu with the progress of Marianne’s love affair, had changed her nature as it had changed her outlook on life.

She hungered for him, and to feel his lips again on hers she would have parted with her soul.

Something of Ribot, her convict father, was perhaps awakened in her just as something of the same parent was perhaps dormant in the demure Marianne, and meanwhile Carstairs, a straight man in everything but love, in which he was a villain, saw the 

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