CHAPTER II





The Duchess of San Martino, a kind-hearted and imposing lady of mature
age who, under favourable atmospheric conditions (in winter-time, for
instance, when the powder was not so likely to run down her face),
might have passed, so far as profile was concerned, for a faded French
beauty of bygone centuries--the Duchess was no exception to the rule.

It was an old rule. Nobody knew when it first came into vogue. Mr.
Eames, bibliographer of Nepenthe, had traced it down to the second
Phoenician period, but saw no reason why the Phoenicians, more than
anybody else, should have established the precedent. On the contrary,
he was inclined to think that it dated from yet earlier days; days when
the Troglodytes, Manigones, Septocardes, Merdones, Anthropophagoi and
other hairy aboriginals used to paddle across, in crazy canoes, to
barter the produce of their savage African glens-serpent-skins, and
gums, and gazelle horns, and ostrich eggs--for those super-excellent
lobsters and peasant girls for which Nepenthe had been renowned from
time immemorial. He based this scholarly conjecture on the fact that a
gazelle horn, identified as belonging to a now extinct Tripolitan
species, was actually discovered on the island, while an adolescent
female skull of the hypo-dolichocephalous (Nepenthean) type had come to
light in some excavations at Benghazi.

It was a pleasant rule. It ran to the effect that in the course of the