The terrace, wide and beautiful, was the work of a famous landscape gardener.  Engineers had come out from England to install the most complete water and power plant imaginable.  Not only did they bring water up from the sea, but they turned the course of a clear mountain stream so that it virtually ran through the pipes and faucets of the vast establishment.  The fountains rivalled in beauty those at Versailles, though not so extensive; the artificial lake, while not built in a night, as one other that history mentions, was quite as attractive.  Water mains ran through miles of the tropical forest and, no matter how great the drouth, the natives kept the verdure green and fresh with a constancy that no real wage-earner could have exercised.  As to the stables, they might have aroused envy in the soul of any sporting monarch.

It was a palace, but they had called it a chateau, because Skaggs stubbornly professed to be democratic.  The word palace meant more to him than chateau, although opinions could not have mattered much on the island of Japat.  Inasmuch as he had not, to his dying day, solved the manifold mysteries of the structure, it is not surprising that he never developed sufficient confidence to call it other than “the place.”

Now and then, officers from some British man-of-war stopped off for entertainment in the chateau, and it was only on such occasions that Skaggs realised what a gorgeously beautiful home it was that he lived in.  He had seen Windsor Castle in his youth, but never had he seen anything so magnificent as the crystal chandelier in his own hallway when it was fully lighted for the benefit of the rarely present guests.  On the occasion of his first view of the chandelier in its complete glory, it is said that he walked blindly against an Italian table of solid marble and was in bed for eleven days with a bruised hip.  The polished floors grew to be a horror to him.  He could not enumerate the times their priceless rugs had slipped aimlessly away from him, leaving him floundering in profane wrath upon the glazed surface.  The bare thought of crossing the great ballroom was enough to send him into a perspiration.  He became so used to walking stiff-legged on the hardwood floors that it grew to be a habit which would not relax.  The servants were authority for the report, that no earlier than the day before his death, he slipped and fell in the dining-room, and thereupon swore that he would have Portland cement floors put in before Christmas.

Lord and Lady Deppingham, being first in the field, at once proceeded to settle themselves in the choicest rooms—­a Henry the Sixth suite which looked out on the sea and the town as well.  It is said that Wyckholme slept there twice, while Skaggs looked in perhaps half a dozen times—­when he was lost in the building, and trying to find his way back to familiar haunts.

There was not a sign of a servant about the house or grounds.  The men whom Bowles had engaged, carried the luggage to the rooms which Lady Deppingham selected, and then vanished as if into space.  They escaped while the new tenants were gorging their astonished, bewildered eyes with the splendors of the apartment.