Imagine a pretty Swiss châlet set high in the cleft of a mountain, with a well-wooded green valley of its own lying at its very door, and beyond the valley, on the far side, the sheer cliff of a lesser peak, rising up so forbiddingly that it might have been the great wall of a fortress or a castle. Such was Valley House, a dot upon the mountain side—a jalousied, red-roofed cottage, guarded everywhere by walls of rock, and yet possessing its own little park, which boasted almost a tropic luxuriance. Never have I seen a greater variety of shrubs, or such an odd assortment, in any garden either of Europe or Africa. Box, Scotch fir, a fine show both of orange and lemon in bloom, the citron, the pomegranate, African palms, Australian eucalyptus, that abundant fern, the native cabellinho—here you had them all in an atmosphere which suggested the warm valleys of the Pyrenees, beneath a sky which the Riviera might have shown to you. So much I perceived directly I went out upon the verandah of the house. The men who had built this châlet had built a retreat among the hills, which the richest might envy. I did not wonder that General Fordibras could speak of it with pride. There was no one but an old negro servant about the house when I passed out to the verandah; and beyond wishing me “Good-morning, Massa Doctor,” I found him entirely uncommunicative. A clock in the hall made out the time to be a quarter past eleven. I perceived that the table had been laid for the mid-day breakfast, and that two covers were set. The second would be for Joan Fordibras, I said; and my heart beating a little wildly at the thought, I determined, if it was possible, to reconnoitre the situation before her arrival, and to know the best or the worst of it at once. That I was a prisoner of the valley I never had a doubt. It lay upon me, then, to face the fact and so to reckon with it that my wit should find the door which these men had so cunningly closed upon me.