An enigma?  His cousin was not an enigma at all.  Keith had called her a tiger mother.  That was correct.  Not every parent could do what she had done.  Not every parent could do what she had done.  Not every parent was placed under the necessity.  Not every parent had the grit.  If all of them fought for their offspring after this fashion, the race would be stronger and better.  Thinking thus, he not only understood.  He approved.  Mrs. Meadows had saved her family.  She was perfect of her kind.

Suddenly he remembered that other parent on the passenger boat when he came to Nepenthe—­that ugly peasant-woman dressed in black, with the scar across her cheek—­how she had tried to console her suffering child.  What had Muhlen said?  “Throw it into the water!  It’s often the only way of ridding oneself of a nuisance.”  Into the water.  His own words.  That was where he, the nuisance, had gone.  It was unpleasant, maybe, to hurtle through eight hundred feet of air.  But men who specialize in making themselves objectionable after Muhlen’s peculiar fashion deserve all they can get.  Sensible women do not put up with such nonsense, if they can help it.

One owes something to one’s self, N’EST-CE Pas?

Decidedly so.

Everything was as clear as daylight.  And he found he had bothered himself long enough about Muhlen; there were so many other interesting things on earth.  A contemptible little episode!  He decided to relegate it into the category of unimportant events.  He was glad that the whole affair had remained in the background, so to speak, of his Nepenthean experiences.  It seemed appropriate.  Odd, all the same, that the most respectable woman on the island should be a murderess.

“Dear me!” he mused.  “How very queer.  It never struck me in the light before.  Shows how careful one must be. . . .  And a relation of mine into the bargain.  H’m.  Some people, if they knew, would call it a compromising situation.  Well, I begin to think it rather creditable than otherwise to our family.  We want more women of this kind on earth.  All mothers ought to be tiger mothers. . . .”

“Don’t you notice, Count, that there is an unwonted sparkle in the air this evening?  Something cleansing, clarifying?”

“To be sure I do,” replied the other.  “And I can tell you the cause of it.  Sirocco is over for the present.  The wind has shifted to the north.  It brightens all nature.  It makes one see things in their true perspective, doesn’t it?”

“That is exactly what I feel,” said Mr. Heard.

CHAPTER XL

The symposium, that evening, might have degenerated into something like an orgy but for the masterful intervention of Denis who was not going to let Keith make a fool of himself.  It took place in the most famous of all the caves of Nepenthe-Luisella’s grotto-cavern dedicated, by common usage, to the worship of Venus and Bacchus.