the midnight sun
But circumstances were too strong for Anne , and she found herself in London fitting on excessively smart and uncomfortable gowns , submitting to have her side locks cut short and curled according to the latest mode , and even to wear a fillet , which scraped her hitherto untrammelled brow . She had little time to think about Byam Warner , but when the memory of him shortened her breath she hastily assured herself that she was unlikely to meet an outcast even on an island , that she should not know him if she did , and that Bath House , whose doors were closed upon him , was a world in itself . And she should see Nevis , which had been as much her home as Warkworth Manor , see those other glowing bits of a vanished paradise . There are certain people born for the tropics , even though bred within the empire of the midnight sun , even when accident has given their imagination no such impulse as Anne Percy 's had received from the works of Byam Warner . Mind and body respond the moment they enter that mysterious belt which divides the moderate zones , upon whose threshold the spirit of worldliness sinks inert , and within whose charmed circle the principle of life is king . Those of the North with the call of the tropics in their blood have never a moment of strangeness ; they are content , at home . The pauses at the still more southern islands on the way up from Barbadoes had been brief , but Anne had had glimpses of great fields of cane , set with the stately homes of planters , the grace of palm-fringed shores and silver sands ; the awful majesty of volcanic islands , torn and racked by earthquake , eaten by fire , sometimes rising so abruptly from the sea as to imply a second half split to its base and hurled to the depths .