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.

Near the chateau there was a real waterfall, reminding one in no small
sense of the misty veils at Lauterbrunnen or Giesbach. The swift stream
which obtained life from these falls, big and little, ran along the base
of the cliff for some distance and was then diverted by means of a deep,
artificial channel into an almost complete circuit of the chateau,
forming the moat. It sped along at the foot of the upper terrace, a wide
torrent that washed between solid walls of masonry which rose to a
height of not less than ten feet on either side. There were two
drawbridges--seldom used but always practicable. One, a handsome example
of bridge building, crossed the current at the terminus of the grand
approach which led up from the park; the other opened the way to the
stables and the servants' quarters at the rear. A small, stationary
bridge crossed the vicious stream immediately below the hanging garden
and led to the ladders by which one ascended to the caverns that ran far
back into the mountain.

Two big, black, irregular holes in the face of the cliff marked the
entrance to these deep, rambling caves, wonderful ca