CHAPTER I.

THE Southern shore of the Sorrentine peninsula offers a striking contrast to the northern side. Towards the north the mountain opens into a broad basin filled to the brim with soft tufo rock, upon which the vegetation of ages has deposited a deep and fertile soil. The hills slope gently to the cliffs which overhang the Bay of Naples and they seem to bear in their outstretched arms a rich offering of Nature's fairest gifts for the Queen-city of the south. The orange and the lemon, the olive and the walnut elbow each other for a footing in the fat, dark earth; and where there is not room for them, the holes and crannies of the walls shoot out streamers of roses and thrust forth nosegays of white-flowered myrtle. Westward from the enchanted garden of Sorrento the rocky promontory juts far into the sea, so that only a narrow channel, scarcely three miles wide, separates the mainland from sea-girt Capri, towering up from the blue water and rearing his rocky crest to heaven like some enormous dragonbeast of fable. Far down in the deep mid-channel, lies the watch-tower bell stolen by the Saracen corsairs from the little fort upon the shore. On St. John's Eve the fishermen, casting their nets in the twilight, hear the tones of the long lost bronze ringing 1 Copyright, 1887, by F. Marion Crawford. No. 331.-VOL. LVI.

up to them out of the depths; and the rough men tell each other how, long ago, on that very night of the year, St. Nicholas raised a fierce storm in the Bocca di Crape, and forced the heathen pirates to lighten their craft by heaving overboard the bell and the rest of the booty they had carried off.

Round the point, and along the southern shore of the little peninsula, the scene changes. The rocks, which on the other side slope gently down, here rise precipitously from the dark water, throwing up great rugged friezes of hacked stone against the sky, casting black shadows under every sharpened peak and seeming to defy the foot of man and beast. Here and there a little town hangs like the nest of a sea-bird in a cranny of the cliffs: poised on the brink, as you may fancy a sea-nymph drawing up her feet out of reach of the waves, facing the fierce hot south-west, whence the storms sweep in, black and melancholy and wrathfully thundering. A mile away, but seemingly within a stone's throw of the cliffs, lie three tiny islands, green in the short spring months, but parched and brown in summer, dark and dangerous in the stormy winter. They are the Isles of the Sirens past them once sailed the mighty Wanderer, bound to the mast of his long black ship, listening with delight and dread to the song of the sea-women, his heart beat

B

ing fast and his blood on fire with the wild strains of their music. Ligeia and Leucosia and Parthenope are not dead, though they plucked the flowers with Persephone, and though the Muses outrivalled them in harmony, and Orpheus vanquished them in song. Still, on calm nights, when the waning moon climbs slowly over the distant hills of the Basilicata, her trembling light falls on the marble limbs and the snowy feathers, the rich wet hair and the passionate dark eyes of the three maidens; and across the lapping waves their voices ring out in a wild despairing harmony of long-drawn complaint. But when the storm rises and the hot south wind dashes the water into whirlpools, and drives clouds of warm spray into the crevices of the islets, the sisters slip from the wet rocks and hide themselves in the cool depths below, where is perpetual calm and a dwelling not fathomed by man.

For man visits the shore and the islands too, from time to time, though he rarely stays long. It is too unlike what man is accustomed to, too far removed from the sphere of the modern world's life, to be a sympathetic resting place for most of our kind. Hither people come in yachts, or upon skinny donkeys from Sorrento, or in little open boats, rowed by lazy fishermen; and they gaze and say it is very classic, and they go away with their cheap impressions and tell their friends that it is hardly worth while after all. That is what everybody does. My tale is of a little party, not absolutely like every one else, who one day said to each other that it would be possible to live among those wild rocks, and that they believed themselves sufficiently interesting to each other to live a life of temporary exile in an inaccessible region. Such a resolution must at once brand those who entered upon it with the stamp of eccentricity, with the Cain's mark which society abhors; and it is necessary to say something of the circumstances which led those four persons to determine upon so desperate a course.

Three of the settlers were young. The fourth was older by some years than any of the rest, but possessed that quality of youth which defies. time, and, especially, that little moiety of time which we call age. The party then, consisted of a man and his wife, of his mother-in-law and his sister. By the silly calculations of social humanity they ought to have quarrelled. As a matter of fact they did not. This was the first step towards eccentricity, and it can only be explained by an honest and dispassionate description of the four persons.

Lady Brenda was five and forty years of age with extenuating circumstances. A German wit once remarked that money alone does not constitute happiness, but that it is also necessary to possess some of it. So years alone do not make age, unless one has some of the ills which age brings. No woman has any right to be old at five-and-forty, but it may be questioned whether at five-and-forty any woman has a right to be taken for her daughter's sister. Lady Brenda was in some respects the youngest of the party; for she had been young when youth was regarded as an agreeable period of life, and she had brought her traditions with her. In appearance she was of middle height, but of faultless figure, slender and rounded as a girl. Her complexion was of the kind produced by avoiding cosmetics. Her thick brown hair grew low upon her forehead, and was not supplemented by any mented by any artful arrangement of other women's tresses among her own. Her features were very straight; and her large bright blue eyes, rather deep-set but wide apart, met everything frankly and surveyed the world with an air of radiant satisfaction which was contagious as her own humour.

Lady Brenda's only daughter had been married to Augustus Chard two years before this time, and had presented her husband with a baby which was universally declared to be at all points the most extraordinary baby ever born, seen, or heard of. Mrs.

Chard's name was Gwendoline. Lady Brenda, in the secrecy of her own heart, knew that the combination of names, Gwendoline Chard, made her think of a race-horse charging into a brick wall. Otherwise she liked her son-in-law very much. The Chards adored each other when they were married, which is usual; but they continued to adore each other after marriage, which is not.

As

Gwendoline's principal taste was for music, an art in which she attained to great excellence, for her playing was original, passionate, and artistic. has been said, she worshipped her husband, who in his turn adored her. She could not deny that he held highly original views upon most points, and that his ideas about things in general were a trifle startling; but he had a way of making himself appear to be right which was very convincing to any one who was already disposed to be of his opinion. Lady Brenda was very fond of Augustus Chard, but considered him more than half a visionary. Gwendoline, on the other hand, was willing to spend her time in helping him to demonstrate that all existing things and conditions of things, with the exception of domestic felicity, were arrant humbug.

Augustus used to say that the taste for the visionary ran in his family. His sister, who had joined the party, illustrated the truth of his statement. Diana Chard had the temperament of a poet with the mind of a lawyer. Philosophy may be defined to mean the poetry of logic, and accordingly Diana's nature had led her to the study of philosophy. She had read enormously, and she argued keenly with a profound knowledge of her subject. But the hypothesis generally belonged to the transcendental region of thought, where, as the problems proposed are beyond the sphere of all possible experience, the discussion also may be prolonged beyond the bounds of all possible time. She enjoyed much more the pleasure of argument than the hope of solution; and

Of Augustus Chard it is only necessary to say that he had considerable powers of organisation, in spite of some eccentricities of mind, and that he generally succeeded in what he undertook. When, therefore, he suggested to his wife, his sister and his motherin-law, that it would be very amusing to buy a half-ruined castle perched upon the wild rocks overlooking the isles of the Sirens, to furnish the place luxuriously, and to pass the summer in a pleasant round of discussion, music, and semi-mystic literary amusement, varied by a few experiments upon the electric phenomena of the Mediterranean, it did not strike those amiable ladies that the scheme was wholly mad. They agreed that it would be very novel and interesting, and that if they did not like it they could go away-which is the peculiar blessing of the rich.

Augustus proposed his plan in January. Before the end of April the castle was bought, repaired and luxuriously furnished: the beds were made the French cook had ordered the kitchen fires to be lighted, and had established a donkey post over the mountains to the market in Castellamare: the great halls and drawingrooms looked thoroughly habitable, and everything was ready for the new owners who were to arrive in the evening. Augustus Chard congratulated himself with the reflection that his whim had been gratified at a trifling cost of ten thousand pounds, and he subsequently discovered that a ducal title had been thrown into the