Leanor tired, in time, of the murderous velocity of her social chariot, dumped the winged vehicle on the trash-heap and went abroad, accompanied by a less rich and more ambitious retinue of high livers.
Like vari-colored butterflies, five years winged overhead, years by no means lacking in color and variety for Leanor. Exacting as were her tastes, she could scarcely have desired a more changeful, a more exquisitely exhilarating life.
Only once in a blue moon did she think of Henry. Thoughts of him, like all other memories of her meteoric past, had been crowded into oblivion by the inrush of the more intimate and actual.
Henry had been very good to her, she had to admit, but he had been none the less impossible. The outcome had been inevitable from the beginning. He was fifteen years her senior. She knew that she could never have held her volatile self down to a life of self-sacrifice and suffering with Henry. The idea was no less absurd than the mating of an esthetic humming-bird with some sedate old owl.
When she consented to marry Henry she had entertained no such preposterous thought as exacting of him a compliance with the ridiculously restricted code of ethics he subsequently set for her. Indeed, she would have grown old and ugly with nothing accomplished, unseeking and unsought. Too, there would have been lamentably fewer notches on her ivory fan than the half-decade last past had yielded.
As the wretched venture had turned out, however, she was still under thirty and was, to employ the homely simile of her latest masculine objective, “as pretty as a peach.”
At the Pacific entrance of the Grand Canal, where the town of Bandora drowses like a sprawling lizard on the sun-baked clay, word went round that the millionaire adventuress was yachting down the west coast, homeward bound.
Everybody who read the public prints knew about Leanor, so at least one element at Bandora awaited her arrival with curious interest. And the curious were to be gratified, for since pretty Leanor habitually did the unexpected, she only proved her consistency when, upon her arrival, she capriciously decided to tarry a fortnight, with the two-fold object of having a look at the great waterway and exploring historic Batoga Island, only a couple of hours distant.
Should the mighty monument to engineering skill prove uninteresting, there remained the secret caves of Batoga, among them La Guaca de San Pedro, by allegation the identical haunted, bat-inhabited cavern in which buccaneering old Henry Morgan had once stored all of his ill-gotten gains and maybe imprisoned the unfortunate nuns captured at Porto Bello! And then, too, there was the celebrated Devil’s Channel, which, according to widely circulated and much-believed stories, sucked small craft down into its omnivorous maw like some insatiable demon lying in wait.