Deep down in her heart there was, as Skye well knew, an unhealed wound that was responsible for her abnormal sensitiveness where men were concerned, but of that she would not think.

“What the men I meet call love is usually lust or greed,” she said once to Aunt Hilda, who was extremely shocked.

But now at last she was free from the Society functions she had been forced to attend by her aunt, the dances in London, the races at Ascot, hunt balls in the winter and the ceaseless round of cocktail parties, luncheons, dinners and theatres. What were they, she had often asked herself, but marriage markets, where a girl was sold to the highest bidder or in many cases laid a trap for him, her body the bait?

Skye had never enjoyed the social whirl, it had seemed so unexciting somehow. She wished for adventure, she longed to see the world and now at last the opportunity to do both lay before her!

She wanted to run, jump and shout with the joy of it. Instead, she walked sedately down the beautiful narrow old Spanish street where all the best shops of Jācara were situated. High above the town were many flat-roofed white houses, usually shaded by the native ombu trees or surrounded by a trelliswork of vines and green figs.

Here the well-to-do inhabitants of Jācara lived, their windows barred with iron grilles so that, as had been traditional down the ages, their daughters were protected from the caballeros who courted them.

But there were many more houses, filthy mud huts and bamboo shacks without even the most primitive necessities of life, where the Indians, negroes and the poorest Mariposans lived. Here children ran about naked, pitiably thin and emaciated, their little fingers clutching like claws for any fragment of food they could find in the gutters or the refuse dumps.

Oblivious to their sufferings, the Palace was silhouetted against the vivid Madonna blue of the sky, its flag flying, the sun glinting on its shining windows and gilded towers. Skye looked up at it and squared her chin so that for a moment she had a strong resemblance to her American grandfather, who had come to Mariposa as a mining engineer over sixty years ago.

“Dictators and bandits, here I come!” she murmured.

Yet anyone else would have been discouraged when luncheon time found her back at the yacht little wiser than she had been when she left it. She had been greeted enthusiastically everywhere she went.

The shops had welcomed her with open arms. Tourists were comparative rarities in Mariposa owing to the unstable state of the Government and the fact that there were very few amenities in the way of modern hotels.

But, although the people of Jācara were anxious to sell her anything and everything in their stores, they were not prepared to supply her with information.