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.