One of those few modern houses was the Villa Mon Repos.  There was a curious history attached to the place.  It had been built about a century ago at the orders of an eccentric French lady, a lyric poetess, who professed to be tired of life.  She had heard that somewhere on Nepenthe was a towering precipice, unique of its kind and convenient for suicidal purposes.  She thought she would like to live near that precipice—­it might come in handy.  There was nothing of the right sort in Paris, she declared; only five-storey hotels and suchlike; the notion of casting herself down from one of those artificial eminences did not appeal to her high-strung temperament; she craved to die like Sappho, her ideal.  An architect was despatched, the ground purchased, the house built and furnished.  That done, she settled up her affairs in France and established herself at Mon Repos.  On the evening of her arrival she climbed the little height at the back of her domain and looked southward, down a sheer wall of rock eight or nine hundred feet high, over the wrinkled ocean.  It made her feel queer.  Further familiarity with the precipice did not breed contempt; her visits to the site became rarer and rarer.  She died, at a patriarchal age, in her bed, after writing a scholarly pamphlet to prove that the tale of Sappho’s leap over her famous silvery crag was a myth, the “purest sensationalism,” a fable of the grammarians “hopelessly irreconcilable with what we know of that great woman’s character.”

This much the bishop had learnt from Mr. Keith.  That gentleman liked the Sappho story; he called it absolutely true to human nature and so creditable to the old lady’s intelligence that he would have insisted upon paying his respects to her had she not expired a good many years before his arrival on the island.  And he, of course, got it from Eames who, as annotator of Perrelli’s antiquities, was in the habit of garnering old details anent private houses and so forth, and had possessed himself, in the course of his researches, of this particular pamphlet which he intended to reprint, together with others of its kind, in an appendix entitled, “Contemporary Social History.”

The driving road terminated at the Old Town.  Mr. Heard, descending from his carriage, followed a pathway which had been described to him by Denis and soon found himself at the entrance of the Villa Mon Repos.  It was an inconspicuous little place, surrounded by three or four chestnut trees and a rose garden.  A steep incline at the back of the property ended, abruptly, in air.  He concluded that the precipice must be on the other side of that slope and that, if so, it was rather too near the house for his taste.  Mr. Heard thoroughly understood the feelings of the French poetess.  He, too, was not fond of precipices.  It was as much as he could do to look down from a church tower without growing dizzy.

On the house-steps, beside an empty cradle, sat a shrivelled hag—­a gaunt, forbidding anatomy, with hooked nose and brown skin.  Tousled grey hair, like that of a Skye terrier, hung over her forehead, half concealing a pair of coal-black eyes.  She rose up, barred the entrance with one claw-like hand, and scrutinized him distrustfully.