lives of hundreds of its loaders in the days of the Good Duke--might
have passed for an earthquake of the first magnitude, so far as noise
and concussion were concerned. The island rocked to its foundations. It
was the signal for the festival of the patron saint to begin.

Nobody could have slept through that din. Mr. Heard, dog-tired as he
was, woke up and opened his eyes.

"Things are happening here," he said--a remark which he found himself
repeating on several later occasions.

He looked round the room. It was not an hotel bed-room. Then he began
to remember things, drowsily. He remembered the pleasant surprise of
the previous evening--how the Duchess had called to mind a small villa,
vacated earlier than she had expected by a lady friend for whom she had
taken it. It was furnished, spotlessly clean, with a woman, a capable
cook, in attendance. She had insisted on his living there.

"So much nicer than a dreadful room in an hotel! You'll show the bishop
all over it, won't you, Denis?"

Walking together, he and Denis, they had been overtaken by another
recent visitor to Nepenthe. It was Mr. Edgar Marten. Mr. Marten was a
hirsute and impecunious young Hebrew of low tastes, with a passion for
mineralogy. He had profited by some University grant to make certain
studies at Nepenthe which was renowned for its variegated rocks. There
was something striking about him, thought Mr. Heard. He said little of
consequence, but Denis listened enthusiastically to his abstruse
remarks about fractures and so forth, and watched with eagerness as he
poked his stick into the rough walls to dislodge some stone that seemed