Early morning tropical light, with her lush flower garden and the impossibly emerald and aquamarine waters of East Bay, which had fronted their small home as a backdrop, she in a wide-brimmed straw hat and off-shoulder morning gown, her clear complexion and her hazel eyes bright and dewy as West Indies dawn, and her long, light brown, almost taffy-blonde hair flowing carefree and loose, teased by the ever-pressing, flirtatious trades…

Had Caroline changed? Not in features, so much as… she was still lissome and slim, no matter birthing three children. She still rode almost every day, walked the acres, kept active as so many sparrows. Oh, there were laugh lines now around her eyes and mouth, more than before, her graceful hands and fingers sparer of flesh. Where, though, had that Caroline gone, he wondered?

And for himself, well, like it or not, not a fortnight before, on Epiphany, he had gone over the edge. He was thirty \ Middle-aged, and Caroline soon to follow by spring.

As if I don't have enough complaints, God help us, he thought.

He felt vaguely queasy and unsettled at the fetching of such a prominent seamark. Like espying the peaks of Dominica, which signified arrival on-passage to the Caribbean, yet knowing that whatever West Indies port of call one was bound for, no matter how joyous the passage, was no more than a week's sailing downwind. And no beating against the inevitability of those insistent Nor'east Trades had ever availed.

Lieutenant Alan Lewrie, RN, peered out at him from the picture with a hopeful grin, the hint of devilment in his eyes that were grey or blue by mood. Shiny, midbrown hair, sun-bleached to light brown and curling slightly at the temples and forehead, yet drawn back into a proper seaman's plaited pigtail, lay over the ears and tumbled over the uniform coat's collar. It was a youthful courtier's lean face he saw, though tanned by blistering sun and sea glare beyond a courtier's fashionable paleness.