g, awe-struck crowd in the street parted to let Chase pass
through on his way to the bungalow. He was riding one of Wyckholme's
thoroughbreds, a fiery, beautiful grey. His manner was that of a
medieval conqueror. He looked neither to right nor to left, but kept his
eyes straight ahead, ignoring the islanders as completely as if they did
not exist.

"It's more like a Christian Endeavour meeting than it was ten minutes
ago," he was saying to himself, all the time wondering when some
reckless unbeliever would hurl a knife at his back. He gravely winked
his eye in the direction of the chateau. "Good old Britt!" he muttered
in his exultation.

CHAPTER XIV

THE LANTERN ABOVE

Chase sat for hours on his porch that night, gazing down upon the
chateau. Lights gleamed in a hundred of its windows. He knew that
revelry held forth in what he was pleased enough to call the feudal
castle, and yet his heart warmed toward the gay people who danced and
sang while he thirsted at the gates.

The bitterness of his own isolation, the ostracism that circumstance had
forced upon him, would have been maddening on this night had not all
rancour been tempered by the glorious achievement in the market-place.
He wondered if the Princess knew what he had dared and what he had
accomplished in the early hours of the night. He wondered if they had
pointed out his solitary light to her--if, now and then, she bestowed a
casual glance upon that twinkling star of his. The porch lantern hung
almost directly above his head.

He was not fool enough to think that he had permanently pulled the wool
over the eyes of the islanders. Sooner or later they would come to know
that he had tricked them, and then--well, he could only shake his head
in dubious contemplation of the hundred things that might happen. He
smiled as he smoked, however, for he looked down upon a world that
thought only of the night at hand.

The chateau was indeed the home of revelry. The pent-up, struggling
spirits of those who had dwelt therein for months in solitude arose in
the wild stampede for freedom. All petty differences between Lady
Deppingham and Drusilla Browne, and they were quite common now, were
forgotten in the whirlwind of relief that came with the strangers from
the yacht. Mrs. Browne's good-looking eager husband revelled in the
prospect of this delirious night--this almost Arabian night. He was
swept off his feet by the radiant Princess--the Scheherezade of