III + 

No one dared speak of it, whether in the Devonshire Club or the Ice House or the breeze-fluttered, sea-washed park where the Negroes gather after working hours, but they heard, almost without hearing, of this death⁠—and this⁠—and another. No one liked to shake hands with his oldest friend; everyone fled from everyone else, though the rats loyally stayed with them; and through the island galloped the Panic, which is more murderous than its brother, the Plague. + 

Still there was no quarantine, no official admission. Inchcape Jones vomited feeble proclamations of the inadvisability of too-large public gatherings, and wrote to London to inquire about Haffkine’s prophylactic, but to Sir Robert Fairlamb he protested, “Honestly, there’s only been a few deaths, and I think it’s all passed over. As for these suggestions of Stokes that we burn the village of Carib, merely because they’ve had several cases⁠—why, it’s barbarous! And it’s been conveyed to me that if we were to establish a quarantine, the merchants would take the strongest measures against the administration. It would ruin the tourist and export business.” + 

But Stokes of St. Swithin’s secretly wrote to Dr. Max Gottlieb, Director of the McGurk Institute, that the plague was ready to flare up and consume all the West Indies, and would Dr. Gottlieb do something about it? + 