RUTH ALLEN, THE English missionary principal, sits within her arbour of bougainvillea, jam-fruit and flowering araliya, breakfasting at a table set out in her garden. Her lapis-lazuli blue eyes change colour in light, in shade. Sometimes a willow pattern plate-blue, or convolvulus violet-blue like the flowers that unfurl their fragile silk petals on the school hedge, or a pale, clear, cerulean blue. They gaze beyond her garden, an English missionary garden, into a distance where the peak of Hantane juts into the sky. Those eyes look at children, flowers, birds, mountains with the same steady, unflinching gaze. Eyes that hold light like mirrors, glittering with prisms that slant through the air. They change colour as shadows fall on the garden. They become amber, flecked with gold. These eyes have seen a myriad visions, visions that brought her to this earthly Paradise to form, to mould the lives of those who dwelt in it—those who had already been baptized at birth in the fonts of churches, but to whom the life of Christ was still an unknown mystery.

Ruth Allen is close to Nature in this primal garden where the balmy air lays the softest caress on a face, on a body that had once known only the English seasons. Ah, what had brought her here in the nineteen thirties from her English schools, from her English University, with her Bible, her hymn book, her books of poetry: Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen—for she was always reading, nostalgically, from those books every morning at school assembly. Often, she would bring guests, English soldiers, officers, who would speak to the rows of schoolgirls sitting on coir matting in the school hall. Or she would read from letters which came from prisoner-of-war camps …

Four ducks in a pond,
A grass bank beyond,
To remember for years
To remember with tears …

Time creeps like a ladybird over a leaf, gold, red, black, glittering, varnished by the light of the sun, its rays still pale, emerging out of the mist, but soon to become brassy with a strong white glare. A green caterpillar silently eats into a mulberry leaf. Her day is circumscribed by her duties, her responsibilities. The garden is her private preserve before she embarks on the prayers, the hymns, the Bible lesson for the day and announcements at school assembly. Later, she teaches English, Latin, Maths. This is her quiet, private time when she sits alone at a table covered with spotless white napery; shining silver cutlery, her tea pot in its cozy, cup and saucer, milk jug, sugar bowl, toast, butter and marmalade. She scoops out a slice of papaw with a tiny silver spoon.