The bitterness of his own isolation, the ostracism that circumstance had forced upon him, would have been maddening on this night had not all rancour been tempered by the glorious achievement in the market-place.  He wondered if the Princess knew what he had dared and what he had accomplished in the early hours of the night.  He wondered if they had pointed out his solitary light to her—­if, now and then, she bestowed a casual glance upon that twinkling star of his.  The porch lantern hung almost directly above his head.

He was not fool enough to think that he had permanently pulled the wool over the eyes of the islanders.  Sooner or later they would come to know that he had tricked them, and then—­well, he could only shake his head in dubious contemplation of the hundred things that might happen.  He smiled as he smoked, however, for he looked down upon a world that thought only of the night at hand.

The chateau was indeed the home of revelry.  The pent-up, struggling spirits of those who had dwelt therein for months in solitude arose in the wild stampede for freedom.  All petty differences between Lady Deppingham and Drusilla Browne, and they were quite common now, were forgotten in the whirlwind of relief that came with the strangers from the yacht.  Mrs. Browne’s good-looking eager husband revelled in the prospect of this delirious night—­this almost Arabian night.  He was swept off his feet by the radiant Princess—­the Scheherezade of his boyhood dreams; his blithe heart thumped as it had not done since he was a boy.  The Duchess of N——­ and the handsome Marchioness of B——­ came into his tired, hungry life at a moment when it most needed the light.  It was he who fairly dragged Lady Agnes aside and proposed the banquet, the dance, the concert—­everything—­and it was he who carried out the hundred spasmodic instructions that she gave.

Late in the night, long after the dinner and the dance, the tired but happy company flocked to the picturesque hanging garden for rest and the last refreshment.  Every man was in his ducks or flannels, every woman in the coolest, the daintiest, the sweetest of frocks.  The night was clear and hot; the drinks were cold.

The hanging garden was a wonderfully constructed open-air plaisance suspended between the chateau itself and the great cliff in whose shadow it stood.  The cliff towered at least three hundred feet above the roof of the spreading chateau, a veritable stone wall that extended for a mile or more in either direction.  Its crest was covered with trees beyond which, in all its splendour, rose the grass-covered mountain peak.  Here and there, along the face of this rocky palisade, tiny streams of water leaked through and came down in a never-ending spray, leaving the rocks cool and slimy from its touch.