For a moment he held her prisoner, his hand against her chin as inflexible as a steel bar, then with a little laugh he set her free.

“You are certainly frank,” he said, “if not complimentary.”

“Are you so vain as to imagine that contact with you could do anything but increase my hatred of you?”

“In that you are at least original,” El Diablo replied, taking a cigar from the box on his desk.

“What do you mean by that?” Skye asked, not quite understanding.

He lit his cigar slowly.

“I mean that I believe you when you say you hate me,” he answered. “Women don’t always mean what they say.”

“It is true enough as far as I am concerned,” Skye said bitterly, then, turning towards him on a sudden impulse, she cried, “why don’t you let me go? There may be women who would like to be here, who could even care for you, although God help them if they did! But I loathe and detest every second that I must be in your company. Surely that cannot be amusing for you?”

“The unexpected never bores me,” El Diablo replied.

“If only I could become fond of you, I might be able to bore you!” Skye cried bitterly, “but as it is, you are inflicting – a life sentence on me!”

Her tone was one of despair.

As if he was suddenly tired of the conversation, El Diablo flicked the ash from his cigar and picked up his riding whip.

“Come,” he commanded, “it’s too early for dramatics.”

Skye felt herself quiver with rage at the manner in which her feelings could be dismissed so lightly and so callously but she knew that to rage and storm would get her no further.

Biting back the words that rose to her lips, she took her hat from the table, where she had laid it on entering the room and put it on her head.

“I am ready,” she said flatly.

Courteously he indicated that she should leave the cave before him and with her chin held high, not looking at him, she stepped out into the sunshine.

She had been too tired and too worried on the night she arrived to take more than a cursory glance at the caves, but now in the bright morning sunlight she saw that they were indeed amazing.

There were hundreds of them opening off the narrow pathways which had been carved out of the solid rock. They had a beauty of their own and the loveliness of their surroundings was almost beyond words.

The sides of the mountains were covered in flowering shrubs and beyond the camp was the cattle pasture, rich grassland gay with scarlet and white verbena.

The river in the distance was as vividly blue as the Mediterranean as it reflected the sky above. And the people moving in this strange secret encampment were as colourful as their surroundings.