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Title: The Palace of Darkened Windows

Author: Mary Hastings Bradley

Illustrator: Edmund Frederick

Release date: June 13, 2005 [eBook #16054]
                Most recently updated: December 11, 2020

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Janet Kegg and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PALACE OF DARKENED WINDOWS ***




Produced by Janet Kegg and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net








The PALACE of DARKENED WINDOWS

By
MARY HASTINGS BRADLEY

AUTHOR OF "THE FAVOR OF KINGS"


ILLUSTRATED BY EDMUND FREDERICK


NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1914


  [Frontispiece illustration: "'It is no use,' he repeated.
  'There is no way out for you.'" (Chapter IV)]



TO
MY HUSBAND



CONTENTS


CHAPTER
      I. THE EAVESDROPPER
     II. THE CAPTAIN CALLS
    III. AT THE PALACE
     IV. A SORRY QUEST
      V. WITHIN THE WALLS
     VI. A GIRL IN THE BAZAARS
    VII. BILLY HAS HIS DOUBTS
   VIII. THE MIDNIGHT VISITOR
     IX. A DESPERATE GAME
      X. A MAID AND A MESSAGE
     XI. OVER THE GARDEN WALL
    XII. THE GIRL FROM THE HAREM
   XIII. TAKING CHANCES
    XIV. IN THE ROSE ROOM
     XV. ON THE TRAIL
    XVI. THE HIDDEN GIRL
   XVII. AT BAY
  XVIII. DESERT MAGIC
    XIX. THE PURSUIT
     XX. A FRIEND IN NEED
    XXI. CROSS PURPOSES
   XXII. UPON THE PYLON
  XXIII. THE BETTER MAN




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


"'It is no use,' he repeated. 'There is no way out for you'"
    _Frontispiece_

"'I do not want to stay here'"

"He found himself staring down into the bright dark eyes of a girl
    he had never seen"

"Billy went to the mouth, peering watchfully out"




THE PALACE OF DARKENED WINDOWS



CHAPTER I

THE EAVESDROPPER


A one-eyed man with a stuffed crocodile upon his head paused before
the steps of Cairo's gayest hotel and his expectant gaze ranged
hopefully over the thronged verandas. It was afternoon tea time; the
band was playing and the crowd was at its thickest and brightest.
The little tables were surrounded by travelers of all nations, some
in tourist tweeds and hats with the inevitable green veils; others,
those of more leisurely sojourns, in white serges and diaphanous
frocks and flighty hats fresh from the Rue de la Paix.

It was the tweed-clad groups that the crocodile vender scanned for a
purchaser of his wares and harshly and unintelligibly exhorted to
buy, but no answering gaze betokened the least desire to bring back
a crocodile to the loved ones at home. Only Billy B. Hill grinned
delightedly at him, as Billy grinned at every merry sight of the
spectacular East, and Billy shook his head with cheerful
convincingosity, so the crocodile merchant moved reluctantly on
before the importunities of the Oriental rug peddler at his heels.

Then he stopped. His turbaned head, topped by the grotesque,
glassy-eyed, glistening-toothed monster, revolved slowly as the
Arab's single eye steadily followed a couple who passed by him up
the hotel steps. Billy, struck by the man's intense interest, craned
forward and saw that one of the couple, now exchanging farewells at
the top of the steps, was a girl, a pretty girl, and an American,
and the other was an officer in a uniform of considerable green and
gold, and obviously a foreigner.

He might be any kind of a foreigner, according to Billy's lax
distinctions, that was olive of complexion and very black of hair
and eyes. Slender and of medium height, he carried himself with an
assurance that bordered upon effrontery, and as he bowed himself
down the steps he flashed upon his former companion a smile of
triumph that included and seemed to challenge the verandaful of
observers.

The girl turned and glanced casually about at the crowded groups
that were like little samples of all the nations of the earth, and
with no more than a faint awareness of the battery of eyes upon her
she passed toward the tables by the railing. She was a slim little
fairy of a girl, as fresh as a peach blossom, with a cloud of pale
gold hair fluttering round her pretty face, which lent her a most
alluring and deceptive appearance of ethereal mildness. She had a
soft, satiny, rose-leaf skin which was merely flushed by the heat of
the Egyptian day, and her eyes were big and very, very blue. There
were touches of that blue here and there upon her creamy linen suit,
and a knot of blue upon her parasol and a twist of blue about her
Panama hat, so that she could not be held unconscious of the
flagrantly bewitching effect. Altogether she was as upsettingly
pretty a young person as could be seen in a year's journey, and the
glances of the beholders brightened vividly at her approach.

There was one conspicuous exception. This exception was sitting
alone at the large table which backed Billy's tiny table into a
corner by the railing, and as the girl arrived at that large table
the exception arose and greeted her with an air of glacial chill.

"Oh! Am I so terribly late?" said the girl with great pleasantness,
and arched brows of surprise at the two other places at the table
before which used tea things were standing.

"My sister and Lady Claire had an appointment, so they were obliged
to have their tea and leave," stated the young man, with an air of
politely endeavoring to conceal his feelings, and failing
conspicuously in the endeavor. "They were most sorry."

"Oh, so am I!" declared the girl, in clear and contrite tones which
carried perfectly to Billy B. Hill's enchanted ears. "I never
dreamed they would have to hurry away."

"They did not hurry, as you call it," and the young man glanced at
his watch, "for nearly an hour. It was a disappointment to them."

"Pin-pate!" thought Billy, with intense disgust. "Is he kicking at a
two-some?"

"And have you had your tea, too?" inquired the girl, with an air of
tantalizing unconcern.

"I waited, naturally, for my guest."

"Oh, not _naturally_!" she laughed. "It must be very unnatural for
you to wait for anything. And you must be starving. So am I--do you
think there are enough cakes left for the two of us?"

Without directly replying, the young man gave the order to the
red-fezzed Arab in a red-girdled white robe who was removing the
soiled tea things, and he assisted the girl into a chair and sat
down facing her. Their profiles were given to the shameless Billy,
and he continued his rapt observations.

He had immediately recognized the girl as a vision he had seen
fluttering around the hotel with an incongruously dismal
couple of unyouthful ladies, and he had mentally affixed a
magnate's-only-daughter-globe-trotting-with-elderly-friends label to
her.

The young man he could not place so definitely. There were a good
many tall, aristocratic young Englishmen about, with slight stoops
and incipient moustaches. This particular Englishman had hair that
was pronouncedly sandy, and Billy suddenly recollected that in
lunching at the Savoy the other day he had noticed that young
Englishman in company with a sandy-haired lady, not so young, and a
decidedly pretty dark-haired girl--it was the girl, of course, who
had fixed the group in Billy's crowded impressions. He decided that
these ladies were the sister and Lady Claire--and Lady Claire, he
judiciously concluded, certainly had nothing on young America.

Young America was speaking. "Don't look so thunderous!" she
complained to her irate host. "How do you know I didn't plan to be
late so as to have you all to myself?"

This was too derisive for endurance. A dull red burned through the
tan on the young Englishman's cheeks and crept up to meet the
corresponding warmth of his hair. A leash within him snapped.

"It is simply inconceivable!" burst from him, and then he shut his
jaw hard, as if only one last remnant of will power kept a seething
volcano, from explosion.

"What is?"

"How any girl--in Cairo, of all places!" he continued to explode in
little snorts.

"You are speaking of--?" she suggested.

"Of your walking with that fellow--in broad daylight!"

"Would it have been better in the gloaming?"

The sweet restraint in the young thing's manner was supernatural. It
was uncanny. It should have warned the red-headed young man, but
oblivious of danger signals, he was plunging on, full steam ahead.

"It isn't as if you didn't know--hadn't been warned."

"You have been so kind," the girl murmured, and poured a cup of tea
the Arab had placed at her elbow.

The young man ignored his. The color burned hotter and hotter in his
face. Even his hair looked redder.

"The look he gave up here was simply outrageous--a grin of insolent
triumph. I'd like to have laid my cane across him!"

The girl's cup clicked against the saucer. "You are horrid!" she
declared. "When we were on shipboard Captain Kerissen was very
popular among the passengers and I talked with him whenever I cared
to. Everyone did. Now that I am in his native city I see no reason
to stalk past him when we happen to be going in the same direction.
He is a gentleman of rank, a relative of the Khedive who is ruling
this country--under your English advice--and he is----"

"A Turk!" gritted out the young man.

"A Turk and proud of it! His mother was French, however, and he was
educated at Oxford and he is as cosmopolitan as any man I ever met.
It's unusual to meet anyone so close to the reigning family, and it
gives one a wonderful insight into things off the beaten track----"

"The beaten--damn!" said the young man, and Billy's heart went out
to him. "Oh, I beg pardon, but you--he--I--" So many things occurred
to him to say at one and the same time that he emitted a snort of
warring and incoherent syllables. Finally, with supreme control, "Do
you know that your 'gentleman of rank' couldn't set foot in a
gentleman's club in this country?"

"I think it's _mean_!" retorted the girl, her blue eyes very bright
and indignant. "You English come here and look down on even the
highest members of the country you are pretending to assist. Why do
you? When he was at Oxford he went into your English homes."

"English madhouses--for admitting him."

A brief silence ensued.

The girl ate a cake. It was a nice cake, powdered with almonds, but
she ate it obliviously. The angry red shone rosily in her cheeks.

The young man took a hasty drink of his tea, which had grown cold
in its cup, and pushed it away. Obstinately he rushed on in his mad
career.

"I simply cannot understand you!" he declared.

"Does it matter?" said she, and bit an almond's head off.

"It would be bad enough, in any city, but in Cairo--! To permit him
to insult you with his company, alone, upon the streets!"

"When you have said insult you have said a little too much," she
returned in a small, cold voice of war. "Is there anything against
Captain Kerissen personally?"

"Who knows anything about any of those fellows? They are all
alike--with half a dozen wives locked up behind their barred
windows."

"He isn't married."

"How do you know?"

"I--inferred it."

The Englishman snorted: "According to his custom, you know, it isn't
the proper thing to mention his ladies in public."

"You are frightfully unjust. Captain Kerissen's customs are the
customs of the civilized world, and he is very anxious to have his
country become modernized."

"Then let him send his sisters out walking with fellow officers....
For _him_ to walk beside _you_----"

"He was following the custom of my country," said the girl, with
maddening superiority. "Since I am an _American_ girl----"

The young Englishman said a horrible thing. He said it with immense
feeling.

"American goose!" he uttered, then stopped short. Precipitately he
floundered into explanation:

"I beg your pardon, but, you know, when you say such bally nonsense
as that--! An American girl has no more business to be imprudent
than a Patagonian girl. You have no idea how these people
regard----"

"Oh, don't apologize," murmured the girl, with charming sweetness.
"I don't mind what you say--not in the least."

The outraged man was not so befuddled but what he saw those danger
signals now. They glimmered scarlet upon his vision, but his blood
was up and he plunged on to destruction with the extraordinary
remark, "But isn't there a reason why you should?"

She gazed at him in mock reflection, as if mulling this striking
thought presented for her consideration, but her eyes were too
sparkly and her cheeks too poppy-pink to substantiate the reflective
pose.

"N-no," she said at last, with an impertinent little drawl. "I can't
seem to think of any."

He did not pause for innuendo. "You mean you don't give a _piastre_
what I think?"

"Not half a _piastre_," she confirmed, in flat defiance.

The young man looked at her. He was over the brink of ruin now;
nothing remained of the interesting little affair of the past three
weeks but a mangled and lamentable wreck at the bottom of a deep
abyss.

Perhaps a shaft of compunction touched her flinty soul at the sight
of his aghast and speechless face, for she had the grace to look
away. Her gaze encountered the absorbed and excited countenance of
Billy B. Hill, and the poppy-pink of her cheeks became poppy-red
and she turned her head sharply away. She rose, catching up her
gloves and parasol.

"Thank you so much for your tea," she said in a lowered tone to her
unfortunate host. "I've had a delicious time.... I'm sorry if I
disappointed you by not cowering before your disapproval. Oh, don't
bother to come in with me--I know my way to the lift and the band is
going to play God Save the King and they need you to stand up and
make a showing."

Billy B. Hill stared across at the abandoned young man with supreme
sympathy and intimate understanding. He was a nice and right-minded
young man and she was an utter minx. She was the daughter of
unreason and the granddaughter of folly. She needed, emphatically
needed, to be shown. But this Englishman, with his harsh and
violently antagonizing way of putting things, was clearly not the
man for the need. It took a lighter touch--the hand of iron in the
velvet glove, as it were. It took a keener spirit, a softer humor.

Billy threw out his chest and drew himself up to his full five feet
eleven and one-half inches, as he passed indoors and sought the
hotel register, for he felt within himself the true equipment for
that delicate mission. He fairly panted to be at it.

Fate was amiable. The hotel clerk, coerced with a couple of
gold-banded ones with the real fragrance, permitted Billy to learn
that the blue-eyed one's name was Beecher, Arlee Beecher, and that
she was in the company of two ladies entitled Mrs. and Miss
Eversham. The Miss Eversham was quite old enough to be entitled
otherwise. They were occupied, the clerk reported, with nerves and
dissatisfaction. Miss Beecher appeared occupied in part--with a
correspondence that would swamp a foreign office.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now it is always a question whether being at the same hotel does or
does not constitute an introduction. Sometimes it does; sometimes it
does not. When the hotel is a small and inexpensive arrangement in
Switzerland, where the advertised view of the Alpenglühen is
obtained by placing the chairs in a sociable circle on the sidewalk,
then usually it does. When the hotel is a large and expensive affair
in gayest Cairo, where the sunny and shady side rub elbows, and
gamesters and débutantes and touts and school teachers and vivid
ladies of conspicuous pasts and stout gentlemen of exhilarated
presents abound, in fact where innocent sightseers and initiated
traffickers in human frailties are often indistinguishable, then
decidedly it does not.

But fate, still smiling, dropped a silver shawl in Billy's path as
he was trailing his prey through the lounge after dinner. The shawl
belonged, most palpably, to a German lady three feet ahead of him,
but gripping it triumphantly, he bounded over the six feet which
separated him from the Eversham-Beecher triangle and with marvelous
self-restraint he touched Miss Eversham on the arm.

"You dropped this?" he inquired.

Miss Eversham looked surprisedly at Billy and uncertainly at the
shawl, which she mechanically accepted. "Why I--I didn't remember
having it with me," she hesitated.

"I noticed you were wearing one other evenings," said Billy, the
Artful, "so I thought----"

"You know whether this is yours or not, don't you, Clara?"
interposed the mother.

"They all look alike," murmured Clara Eversham, eying helplessly the
silver border.

Billy permitted himself to look at Miss Beecher. That young person
was looking at him and there was a disconcerting gaiety in her
expression, but at sight of him she turned her head, faintly
coloring. He judged she recalled his unmannerly eavesdropping that
afternoon.

"Pardon--excuse me--but that is to me belonging," panted an agitated
but firm voice behind them, and two stout and beringed hands seized
upon the glittering shawl in Miss Eversham's lax grasp. "It but just
now off me falls," and the German lady looked belligerent accusation
upon the defrauding Billy.

There was a round of apologetic murmurs, unacknowledged by the
recipient, who plunged away with her shawl, as if fearing further
designs upon it. Billy laughed down at the Evershams.

"I feel like a porch climber making off with her belongings. But I
had seen you with----"

"I do think I had mine this evening, after all," murmured Clara,
with a questioning glance after the departing one.

"An uncultured person!" stated Mrs. Eversham.

Miss Beecher said nothing at all. Her faint smile was mockingly
derisive.

"Anyway you must let me get you some coffee," Billy most
inconsequentially suggested, beckoning to the red-girdled Mohammed
with his laden tray, and because he was young and nice looking and
evidently a gentleman from their part of the world and his evening
clothes fitted perfectly and had just the right amount of braid,
Mrs. Eversham made no objection to the circle of chairs he hastily
collected about a taborette, and let him hand them their coffee and
send Mohammed for the cream which Miss Eversham declared was
indispensable for her health.

"If I take it clear I find it keeps me awake," she confided, and
Billy deplored that startling and lamentable circumstance, and
passed Mrs. Eversham the sugar and wondered if they could be the
Philadelphia Evershams of whom he had heard his mother speak, and
regretted that they were not, for then they would know who he
was--William B. Hill of Alatoona, New York. He found it rather
stupid traveling alone. Of course one met many Americans, but----

Mrs. Eversham took up that "but" most eagerly, and recounted
multiple and deplorable instances of nasal countrywomen doing the
East and monopolizing the window seats in compartments, and Miss
Eversham supplied details and corrections.

Still Miss Beecher said nothing. She had a dreamy air of not
belonging to the conversationalists. But from an inscrutable
something in her appearance, Billy judged she was not unentertained
by his sufferings.

At the first pause he addressed her directly. "And how do you like
Cairo?" was his simple question. That ought, he reflected, to be an
entering wedge.

The young lady did not trouble to raise her eyes. "Oh, very much,"
said she negligently, sipping her coffee.

"Oh, very well!" said Billy haughtily to himself. If being her
fellow countryman in a strange land, and obviously a young and
cultivated countryman whom it would be a profit and pleasure for any
girl to know, wasn't enough for her--what was the use? He ought to
get up and go away. He intended to get up and go away--immediately.

But he didn't. Perhaps it was the shimmery gold hair, perhaps it was
the flickering mischief of the downcast lashes, perhaps it was the
loveliness of the soft, white throat and slenderly rounded arms.
Anyway he stayed. And when the strain of waltz music sounded through
the chatter of voices about them and young couples began to stroll
to the long parlors, Billy jumped to his feet with a devastating
desire that totally ignored the interminable wanderings of Clara
Eversham's complaints.

"Will you dance this with me?" he besought of Miss Arlee Beecher,
with a direct gaze more boyishly eager than he knew.

For an agonizing moment she hesitated. Then, "I think I will," she
concluded, with sudden roguery in her smile.

Stammering a farewell to the Evershams, he bore her off.

It would be useless to describe that waltz. It was one of the
ecstatic moments which Young Joy sometimes tosses from her garlanded
arms. It was one of the sudden, vivid, unforgettable delights which
makes youth a fever and a desire. For Billy it was the wildest stab
the sex had ever dealt him. For though this was perhaps the nine
thousand nine hundred and ninety-ninth girl with whom he had danced,
it was as if he had discovered music and motion and girls for the
first time.

The music left them by the windows.

"Thank you," said Billy under his breath.

"You didn't deserve it," said the girl, with a faint smile playing
about the corners of her lips. "You know you stared--scandalously."

Grateful that she mentioned only the lesser sin, "Could I help it?"
he stammered, by way of a finished retort.

The smile deepened, "And I'm afraid you listened!"

He stared down at her anxiously. "Will you like me better if I
didn't?" he inquired.

"I shan't like you at all if you did."

"Then I didn't hear a word.... Besides," he basely uttered, "you
were entirely in the right!"

"I should think I was!" said Arlee Beecher very indignantly. "The
very notion--! Captain Kerissen is a very nice young man. He is
going to get me an invitation to the Khedive's ball."

"Is that a very crumby affair?"

"Crumby? It's simply gorgeous! Everyone is mad over it. Most
tourists simply read about it, and it is too perfect luck to be
invited! Only the English who have been presented at court are
invited and there's a girl at the Savoy Hotel I've met--Lady Claire
Montfort--who wasn't presented because she was in mourning for her
grandmother last year, and she is simply furious about it. An old
dowager here said that there ought to be similar distinctions among
the Americans--that only those who had been presented at the White
House ought to be recognized. Fancy making the White House a social
distinction!" laughed the daughter of the Great Republic.

"I wonder," said Billy, "if I met a nice Turkish lady, whether she
would get me an invitation? Then we could have another waltz----"

"There aren't any Turkish ladies there," uttered Miss Beecher
rebukingly. "Don't you know that? When they are on the
Continent--those that are ever taken there--they may go to dances
and things, but here they can't, although some of them are just as
modern as you or I, I've heard, and lots more educated."

"You speak," he protested, "from a superficial acquaintance with my
academic accomplishments."

"Are you so very--proficient?"

"I was--I am Phi Beta Kappa," he sadly confessed.

Her laugh rippled out. "You don't look it," she cheered.

"Oh, no, I don't look it," he complacently agreed. "That's the lamp
in the gloom. But I am. I couldn't help it. I was curious about
things and I studied about them and faculties pressed honors upon
me. I am even here upon a semi-learned errand. I wanted to have a
look at the diggings a friend of mine is making at Thebes and
several looks at the dam at Assouan, for I am by way of being an
engineer myself--a beginning engineer."

"You have been up the Nile, then?"

"Yes, I'm just back. Now I'm going to see something of Cairo before
I leave."

"We start up the Nile day after to-morrow," said she.

"The day after--" he stopped.

'Twas ever thus. Fate never did one good turn but she sneaked back
and jabbed him unawares. She was a tricksy jade.

"That's--that's gloomy luck," said Billy, and felt outraged. "Why,
how about that Khedive ball thing?"

"Oh, that's when we come back."

She was coming back, then. Hope lifted her head.

"When will that be?"

"In three weeks. It takes about three weeks to go up to the first
cataract and back, doesn't it?"

"Yes, by boat," he said, adding hopefully, "but lots of people like
the express trains better. They--they don't keep you so long on the
way."

"Oh, I hate trains," said she cheerfully.

Three weeks ... Ruefully he surveyed the desolation. "I ought to be
gone by then," he muttered.

A trifle startled, the girl looked up at him. As he was not looking
at her, but staring moodily into what was then black vacancy, her
look lingered and deepened. She saw a most bronzed and hardy looking
young man, tall and broad-shouldered, with gray eyes, wide apart
under straight black brows, and black hair brushed straight back
from a wide forehead. She saw a rugged nose, a likeable mouth, and
an abrupt and aggressive chin, saved somehow from grimness by a deep
cleft in the blunt end of it.... She thought he was a very
_stirring_ looking young man. Undoubtedly he was a very sudden
young man--if he meant one bit of what he intimated.

Feminine-wise, she mocked.

"What a calamity!"

"Yes, for me," said Billy squarely. "You know it's--it's awfully
jolly to meet a girl from home out here!"

"A girl from _home_----!"

"Well, all America seems home from this place. And I shouldn't be
surprised if we knew a lot of the same people ... You can get a good
line on me that way, you know," he laughed. "Now I went to Williams
and then to Boston Tech., and there must be acquaintances----"

"Don't!" said Arlee, with a laughing gesture of prohibition. "We
probably have thousands of the same acquaintances, and you would
turn out to be some one I knew everything about--perhaps the first
fiancé of my roommate whose letters I used to help her answer."

"Where did you go to school?"

"At Elm Court School, near New York. For just a year."

He shook his head with an air of relief. "Never was engaged to
anybody's roommate there.... But if you'd rather not have my
background painted----"

"_Much_ rather not," said the girl gaily. "Why, half the romance, I
mean the fun, of meeting people abroad is _not_ knowing anything
about them beforehand."

The music was beginning again. Unwillingly the remembrance of the
outer world beat back into Billy's mind. Unhappily he became aware
that the room appeared blackened with young men in evening clothes,
staring ominously his way.

Squarely he stood in front of the girl. "I think this is the encore
to our dance," he told her with a little smile.

She shook her pretty head laughingly at him--and then yielded to his
clasping hands. "But we must dance back to the Evershams," she
demurred. "It is time for us to go to our concert."

But Billy had no intention of relinquishing her before the music
ceased. It was a one step, and it carried them with it in a gaiety
of rhythm to which the girl gave herself with the light-hearted
abandon of a romping child. Her light feet seemed scarcely to brush
the floor; the delicate flush of her cheeks deepened with the
stirring blood; her lips parted breathlessly over white little
teeth, and when her eyes, intensely blue, met Billy's, the smile in
them quickened in sparkling radiance. She was the very spirit of the
dance; she was Youth and Joy incarnate. And the heart behind the
white shirt bosom near which her fairy hair was floating began to
pitch and toss like a laboring ship in the very devil of a sea.

"I think I'll go up the Nile again," said Billy irrelevantly.

She laughed elfishly at him, her head swaying faintly with the
rhythm.

"Three weeks," said Billy under his breath, "that's twenty-one
days--at ten dollars a day. Now I wonder how many hours--or
moments--that rash outlay would assure?"

"You miser! You calculating----"

"You have to calculate--when you're an engineer."

"But to be sure spoils the charm! Now I--I do things on impulse."

"If you will only have the impulse to dance with me--on the
Nile----"

"Why not risk it?" she challenged lightly, arrant mischief in her
eyes. She added, in mocking tone, "There's a moon."

"That's a clincher," said he, with an air of decision. A faint
question dwelt in the look she gave him. It was ridiculous to think
he meant anything he was saying, but--she felt suddenly a little
confused and shy under that light-hearted young gaiety which took
every man's friendly admiration happily for granted.

In silence they finished the dance, and this time the music failed
them when they were near the wide entrance to the room where the
Evershams, beckoning specters, were standing.

"I'm keeping them waiting," said the girl, with a note of concern
which she had not shown over her performance in that line earlier in
the day. But Billy had no time for humorous comparisons.

"When can I see you again?" he demanded bluntly. "Can I see you
to-morrow?"

"To-morrow is a very busy day," she parried.

"But the evening----?"

"I shall be here," she admitted.

"And could I--could I take you--and the Evershams, of
course--somewhere, anywhere, you'd like to go? If there's any other
concert----"

She shook her head. "We leave bright and early the next morning, and
I know Mrs. Eversham will want her rest. I think they would rather
stay here in the hotel after dinner."

"But you will keep a little time for me?" Billy urged. "Of course,
staying in the same hotel, I can't take my hat and go and make a
formal call on you--but that's the result I'm after."

They had paused, to finish this colloquy, a few feet away from the
ladies, who were regarding with dark suspicion this interchange of
lowered tones.

Suddenly Arlee raised her eyes and gave Billy a quick look,
questioning, shyly serious.

"I shall be here--and you can call on me," she promised, and bade
him farewell.

She left him deliriously, inexplicably, foolishly in spirits. He
plunged his hands in his pockets and squared his shoulders; he
wanted to whistle, he wanted to sing, he wanted to do anything to
vent the singular hilarity which possessed him.

Then he saw, across the room, a sandy-haired young man regarding him
with dour intentness, and the spectacle, instead of feeding his joy,
sent conjecturing chills down his spine. His bubble was pricked.
Suppose, ran the horrid thought, suppose she was simply paying off
the Englishman? Girls, even blue-eyed, angel-haired girls of
cherubic aspect, have not been unknown to perform such deeds of
darkness! And this particular girl had mischief in her eyes.... The
thought was unpleasantly likely. What had he, Billy B. Hill, of New
York--State--to offer to casual view worthy of competition with the
presumable advantages of a young Englishman whose sister was staying
with a Lady Claire? Perhaps the fellow himself had a title....

Considerably dashed, he went out to consult the register upon that
point.




CHAPTER II

THE CAPTAIN CALLS


Now, when the card of Captain Kerissen was handed to Miss Arlee
Beecher the next afternoon, when she sauntered in from the sunny
out-of-doors and paused at the desk for the voluminous harvest of
letters the last mail had brought, and furthermore the information
was added that the Captain was waiting, little Miss Beecher's first
thought was the resentful appreciation that the Captain was
overdoing it.

She hesitated, then, with her hands full of letters and parasol, she
crossed the hall into the reception room. She intended to let her
caller see his mistake, so with her burdened hands avoiding a
handclasp, she greeted him and stood waiting, with eyes of inquiry
upon him.

The young man smiled secretly to himself. He was a young man not
without experience in ladies' moods and he had a very shrewd idea
that somebody had been making remarks, but he did not permit a hint
of any perception of the coolness of her manner to impair the
impeccable suavity of his.

"Will you accord me two moments of your time that I may give you
two messages?" he inquired, and Arlee felt suddenly ill-bred before
his gentle courtesy and she sat down abruptly upon the edge of the
nearest chair.

The Captain placed one near her and seated himself, with a clank of
his dangling scabbard. He was really a very handsome young man,
though his features were too finely finished to please a robust
taste, and there was a hint of insolence and cruelty about the nose
and mouth--though this an inexperienced and light-hearted young
tourist of one and twenty did not more than vaguely perceive.

"They are, the both, of the ball of the Khedive," he continued in
his English, which was, though amazingly fluent and ready, a literal
sounding translation of the French, which was in reality his mother
tongue. "My sister thinks she can arrange that invitation. You are
sure that you will be returned at Cairo, then?"

"Oh, dear, yes! I would come back by train," Arlee declared eagerly,
"rather than miss that wonderful ball!"

She thought how astonished a certain red-headed young Englishman
would be to see her at that ball, and how fortunate she was compared
to his haughty and disappointed friend, the Lady Claire, and the
chill of her resentment against the Captain's intrusion vanished
like snow in the warmth of her gratitude.

"Good!" He smiled at her with a flash of white teeth. "Then my
sister herself will see one of the household of the Khedive and
request the invitation for you and for your chaperon, the
Madame----"

"Eversham."

"Eversham. She will be included for you, but not the daughter--no?"

"Is that asking too much?" said Arlee hesitantly. "Miss Eversham
would feel badly to be left out.... But, anyway, I'm not sure that I
shall be with them then," she reflected.

"Not with them?" The young man leaned forward, his eyes curiously
intent upon her.

"No, I may be with some other friends. You see, it's this way--I
didn't come abroad with the Evershams in the first place. I came in
the fall with a school friend and her mother to see Italy. The
Evershams were friends of theirs and were stopping at the same
hotel, and since my friends were called back very suddenly, the
Evershams asked me to go on to Egypt with them. It was very nice of
them, for I'm a dreadful bother," said Arlee, dimpling.

"But you speak of leaving them?" he said.

"Oh, yes, I may do that as soon as some other friends of mine, the
Maynards, reach here. They are coming here on their way to the Holy
Land and I want to take that trip with them. And then I'll probably
go back to America with them."

The Turkish captain stared at her, his dark eyes rather inscrutable,
though a certain wonder was permitted to be felt in them.

"You American girls--your ways are absolute like the decrees of
Allah!" he laughed softly. "But tell me--what will your father and
your mother say to this so rapidly changing from the one chaperon to
the other?"

"I haven't any father or mother," said the girl. "I have a big,
grown-up, married brother, and he knows I wouldn't change from one
party unless it was all right." She laughed amusedly at the young
man's comic gesture of bewilderment. "You think we American girls
are terribly independent."

"I do, indeed," he avowed, "but," and he inclined his dark head in
graceful gallantry, "it is the independence of the princess of the
blood royal."

A really nice way of putting it, Arlee thought, contrasting the
chivalrous homage of this Oriental with the dreadful "American
goose!" of the Anglo-Saxon.

"But tell me," he went on, studying her face with an oddly intent
look, "do these friends now, the Evershams, know these others,
the--the----"

"Maynards," she supplied. "Oh, no, they have never met each other.
The Maynards are friends I made at school. And Brother has never met
them either," she added, enjoying his humorous mystification.

"The decrees of Allah!" he murmured again. "But I will promise you
an invitation for your chaperon and arrange for the name of the lady
later--_n'est-ce-pas?_"

"Yes, I will know as soon as I return from the Nile. You are going
to a lot of bother, you and your sister," declared Arlee gratefully.

"I go to ask you to take a little trouble, then, for that sister,"
said the Captain slowly. "She is a widow and alone. Her life is--is
_triste_--melancholy is your English word. Not much of brightness,
of new things, of what you call pleasure, enters into that life, and
she enjoys to meet foreign ladies who are not--what shall I
say?--seekers after curiosities, who think our ladies are strange
sights behind the bars. You know that the Europeans come uninvited
to our wedding receptions and make the strange questions!"

Arlee had the grace to blush, remembering her own avid desire to
make her way into one of those receptions, where the doors of the
Moslem harem are thrown open to the feminine world in widespread
hospitality.

The Captain went on, slowly, his eyes upon her, "But she knows that
you are not one of those others and has requested that you do her
the grace to call upon her. I assured her that you would, for I know
that you are kind, and also," with an air of naïve pride which Arlee
found admirable in him, "it is not all the world who is invited to
the home of our--our _haut-monde_, you understand?... And then it
will interest you to see how our ladies live in that seclusion which
is so droll to you. Confess you have heard strange stories," and he
smiled in quizzical raillery upon her.

The girl's flush deepened with the memory of the confusing stories
her head was stuffed with; tales of the bloomers, the veils, the
cushions, the sweetmeats, the _nargueils_, the rose baths of the old
_régime_ were jostled by the stories of the French nurses and
English governesses and the Paris fashions of the new era. She had
listened breathlessly, with her eager young zest in life, to the
amazing and contradictory narrations of the tourists who were every
whit as ignorant as she was, and her curiosity was on fire to see
for herself. She felt that a chance in a thousand had come her lucky
way.

"I shall be very glad to call," she told him, "just as soon as I
return from the Nile."

His face showed his disappointment--and a certain surprise. "But not
before?"

"Why, I go to-morrow morning, you know," said Arlee. "And----"

"It would be better--because of the invitation," he said slowly,
hesitantly, with the air of one who does not wish to importune. "My
sister would like to ask for one who is known personally to herself.
She thought you could render her a few minutes this afternoon."

"This afternoon?" Arlee thought quickly. "I ought to be packing,"
she murmured, "my things aren't all ready.... And Mrs. Eversham is
at the bazaars again and dear knows when she will be back."

Just for an instant a spark burned in the black eyes watching the
girl, and then was gone, and when she raised her own eyes, perplexed
and considering, to him, she saw only the same courteously
attentive, but faintly indolent regard as before. Then the young man
smiled, with an air of frank amusement.

"That would seem to be a dispensation!" he laughed. "My sister and
the Madame Eversham--no, they would not be sympathetic!... But if
you can come," he went on quickly, leaning forward and speaking in a
hurried, lowered tone, "it can be arranged in an instant. I am to
telephone to my sister and she will send her car for you. It is not
far and it does not need but a few minutes for the visit--unless you
desire. I cannot escort you in the car--it is not _en règle_--but I
will come to the house and present you and then depart, that you
ladies may exchange the confidences.... Does that programme please
you?"

"I--I don't know your sister's name," said Arlee.

He smiled. "Nechedil Azade Seniha--she is the widow of Tewfik Pasha.
But say Madame simply to her--that will suffice. Shall I, then,
telephone her?"

Just an instant Arlee hesitated, while her imagination fluttered
about the thought like humming-birds about sweets. Already she was
thinking of the story she could have to tell to her fellow travelers
here and to the people at home. It was a chance, she repeated to
herself, in a thousand, and the familiar details of phones and
motors seemed to rob its suddenness of all strangeness.... Besides,
there was that matter of the Khedive's ball. It would be very
ungracious to refuse a few minutes' visit to a lady who was going to
so much trouble for her.

"I will be ready in ten minutes," she promised, springing to her
feet.

The forgotten letters scattered like a fall of snow and the Captain
stooped quickly for them, hiding the flash of exultation in his
face. He thrust the letters rather hurriedly upon her.

"Good!... But need you wait for a _toilette_ when you are so--so
_ravissante_ now?"

He gazed with frank appreciation at the linen suit she was wearing,
but she shook her head laughingly at him. "To be interesting to a
foreign lady I must have interesting clothes," she avowed. "I shan't
be ten minutes--really."

"Then the car will be in waiting. I will give your name to the
chauffeur and he will approach you." He thought a minute, and then
said, quickly, "And I will leave a note for Madame Eversham at the
desk to inform her of your destination and to express my regret that
she is not here to accept the invitation." His voice was flavored
with droll irony. "In ten minutes--_bien sûr_?"

She confirmed it most positively, and it really was not quite
eighteen when she stepped out on the veranda, a vision, a positively
devastating vision in soft and filmy white, with a soft and filmy
hat all white lace and a pink rose. It is to be hoped that she did
not know how she looked. Otherwise there would have been no excuse
for her and she should have been summarily haled to the nearest
justice, with all other breakers of the peace, and condemned to good
conduct and Shaker bonnets for the rest of her life. The rose on the
hat, with such a rose of a face beneath the hat, was sheer wanton
cruelty to mankind.

It brought the heart into the throat of one young man who was
reading his paper beneath the striped awning, when he was not
watching, cat-like, the streets and the hotel door. He dropped the
paper with an agitated rustle and half rose to his feet; his eyes,
alert and humorous gray-blue eyes, lighted with eagerness. His hand
flew up to his hat.

He did not need to take it off. She did not even see him. She was
hurrying forward to the steps, following a long, lean Arab, some
dragoman, apparently, in resplendent pongee robes, who opened the
door of a limousine for her. The next instant he slammed the door
upon her, mounted the front seat, and the car rolled away.




CHAPTER III

AT THE PALACE


That limousine utterly routed the tiny little qualm which had been
furtively worming into Arlee's thrill of adventure. Nothing very
strange or out-of-the-way, she thought, could be connected with such
a modern car; it presented every symptom of effete civilization.
Against the upholstery of delicate gray flamed the scarlet
poinsettias hanging in wall vases of crystal overlaid with silver
tracery; the mirror which confronted her was framed in silver, and
beneath it a tiny cabinet revealed a frivolous store of powders and
pins and scents. Decidedly the Oriental widow of said sequestration
had a car very much up to times. The only difference which it
presented from the cars of any modern city or of any modern lady was
in the smallness of the window panes, whose contracted size
confirmed the stories of the restrictions which Arlee had been told
were imposed upon Moslem ladies by even those emancipated masculine
relatives who conceded cars.

She peered out of the diminutive windows at the throng of life in
the unquiet streets as they halted for the passing of a camel laden
with bricks and stones from a demolished building; the poor thing
teetered precariously past under such a back-breaking load that the
girl felt it would have been a mercy to add the last straw and be
done with it. After it bobbed what was apparently an animated load
of hay, so completely were this other camel's legs hidden by his
smothering burden.

Then the car shot impatiently forward, passing a dog cart full of
fair-haired English children, the youngest clasped in the arms of a
dark-skinned nurse, and behind the cart ran an indefatigable _sais_,
bare-legged and sinewy, his red headdress and gold-embroidered
jacket and blue bloomers flashing in the sun. On the sidewalk a
party of American tourists were capitulating to a post-card vender,
and ahead of them a victoria load of German sightseers careened
around the corner in the charge of a determined dragoman.

Arlee smiled in happy superiority over these mere outsiders. _She_
was not going about the beaten track, peeping at mosques and tombs
and bazaars and windows; she was penetrating into the real life of
this fascinating city, getting behind the grills and veils to
glimpse the inner secrets.

She thought, with a deepening of the sparkle in her blue eyes and a
defiant lifting of the pointed chin, of a certain sandy-haired young
Englishman and how wrong and reasonless and narrow and jealous were
his strictures upon her politeness to young Turks, and she thought
with a sense of vindicated pride of how thoroughly that nice young
man who had managed to introduce himself last night had endorsed her
views. Americans understood. And then her thoughts lingered about
Billy and she caught herself wondering just how much he did mean
about coming up the Nile again. For upon happening to meet Billy
that morning--Billy had devoted two hours and a half to the accident
of that happening!--he had joyously mentioned that he was trying to
buy out another man's berth upon that boat. It wasn't so much his
wanting to come that was droll--teasing sprites of girls with
peach-blossom prettiness are not unwonted to the thunder of pursuing
feet--but the frank and cheery way he had of announcing it. Not many
men had the courage of their desires. Not any men that little Miss
Arlee had yet met had the frankness of such courage. And because all
women love the adventurous spirit and are woefully disappointed in
its masculine manifestations, she felt a gay little eagerness which
she would have refused to own. It would be rather fun to see more of
him--on the Nile--while Robert Falconer was sulking away in Cairo.
And then when she returned she would surprise and confound that
misguided young Englishman with her unexpected--to him--presence at
the Khedive's ball. And after that--but her thoughts were lost in
haziness then. Only the ball stood out distinct and glittering and
fairylike.

Thinking all these brightly revengeful thoughts she had been
oblivious to the many turnings of the motor, though it had occurred
to her that they were taking more time than the car had needed to
appear, and now she looked out the window and saw that they were in
a narrow street lined with narrow houses, whose upper stories,
slightly projecting in little bays, all presented the elaborately
grilled façades of _mashrubiyeh_ work which announced the barred
quarters of the women, the _haremlik_.

Arlee loved to conjure up a romantic thrill for the mysterious East
by reflecting that behind these obscuring screens were women of all
ages and conditions, neglected wives and youthful favorites, eager
girls and revolting brides, whose myriad eyes, bright or dull or gay
or bitter, were peering into the tiny, cleverly arranged mirrors
which gave them a tilted view of the streets. It was the sense of
these watching eyes, these hidden women, which made those screened
windows so stirring to her young imagination.

The motor whirled out of the narrow street and into one that was
much wider and lined by houses that were detached and separated,
apparently, by gardens, for there was a frequent waving of palms
over the high walls which lined the road. The street was empty of
all except an old orange vender, shuffling slowly along, with a
cartwheel of a tray on her head, piled with yellow fruit shining
vividly in the hot sun. The quiet and the solitude gave a sense of
distance from the teeming bazaars and tourist-ridden haunts, which
breathed of seclusion and aloofness.

The car stopped and Arlee stepped out before a great house of
ancient stone which rose sharply from the street. A high, pointed
doorway, elaborately carved, was before her, arching over a dark
wooden door heavily studded with nails. Overhead jutted the little
balconies of _mashrubiyeh_. She had no more than a swift impression
of the old façade, for immediately a doorkeeper, very vivid in his
Oriental blue robes and his English yellow leather Oxfords, flung
open the heavy door.

Stepping across the threshold, with a sudden excited quickening of
the senses, in which so many things were mingled that the misgiving
there had scarcely time to make itself felt, Arlee found herself in
a spacious vestibule, marble floored and inlaid with brilliant tile.
She had just a glimpse of an inner court between the high arches
opposite, and then her attention was claimed by Captain Kerissen,
who sprang forward with a flash of welcome in his eyes that was like
a leap of palpable light.

"You are come!" he said, in a voice which was that of a man almost
incredulous of his good fortune. Then he bowed very formally in his
best military fashion, straight-backed from the waist, heels stiffly
together. "I welcome you," he said. "My sister is rejoiced.... This
stair--if you please."

He waved to a stairway on the left, a small, steep affair, which
Arlee ascended slowly, a sense of strangeness mounting with her, in
spite of her confident bearing. She had not realized how odd it
would feel to be in this foreign house with the Captain at her
heels.

There was a door at the top of the stairs standing open into a long,
spacious room which seemed shrouded in twilight after the sunflooded
court. One entire side of the room was a brown, lace-like screen of
_mashrubiyeh_ windows; wide divans stretched beside them, and at the
end of the room, facing Arlee, was a throne-like chair raised on a
small dais and canopied with heavy silks.

By one of the windows a woman was squatting, a short, stout,
turbaned figure, striking a few notes on a tambourine and crooning
softly to herself in a low guttural. She raised her head without
rising, to look at the entering couple, and for a startled second
Arlee had the half hysterical fear that this squatting soloist was
the _triste_ and aristocratic representative of the _haut-monde_ of
Moslem which the Captain had brought her to see, but the next
instant another figure appeared in a doorway and came slowly toward
them.

Flying to the winds went Arlee's anticipations of somber elegance.
She saw the most amazingly vivid creature that she had ever laid
eyes on--a woman, young, though not in her first youth, penciled,
powdered, painted, her hair a brilliant red, her gown a brilliant
green. After the first shock of scattering amazement, Arlee became
intensely aware of a pair of yellow-brown eyes confronting her with
a faintly smiling and rather mocking interrogation. The dark of
_kohl_ about the eyes emphasized a certain slant _diablérie_ of line
and a faint penciling connected with the high and supercilious arch
of the brows. Henna flamed on the pointed tips of the fingers
blazoned with glittering rings, and Arlee fancied the brilliance of
the hair was due to this same generous assistance of nature.

"My soul!" thought the girl swiftly, "they _do_ get themselves up!"

The Captain had stepped forward, speaking quickly in Turkish, with a
hard-sounding rattle of words. The sister glanced at him with a
deepening of that curious air of mockery and let fall two words in
the same tongue. Then she turned to Arlee.

"_Je suis enchantée--d'avoir cet honneur--cet honneur
inattendu----_"

She did not look remarkably enchanted, however. The eyes that played
appraisingly over her pretty caller had a quality of curious
hardness, of race hostility, perhaps, the antagonism of the East for
the West, the Old for the New. Not all the modernity of clothes, of
manners, of language, affected what Arlee felt intensely as the
strange, vivid foreignness of her.

"My sister does not speak English--she has not the occasion," the
Captain was quickly explaining.

"_Gracious_" thought Arlee, in dismay. She had no illusions about
her French; it did very well in a shop or a restaurant, but it was
apt to peeter out feebly in polite conversation. Certainly it was no
vessel for voyaging in untried seas. There were simply loads of
things, she thought discouragedly, the things she wanted most to
ask, that she would not be able to find words for.

Aloud she was saying, "I am so glad to have the honor of being here.
I am only sorry that my French is so bad. But perhaps you can
understand----"

"I understand," assented the Turkish woman, faintly smiling.

The Captain had brought forward little gilt chairs of a French
design which seemed oddly out of place in this room of the East, and
the three seated themselves. Out of place, too, seemed the grand
piano which Arlee's eyes, roving now past her hostess, discovered
for the first time.

"It was so kind of you," began Arlee again as the silence seemed to
be politely waiting upon her, "to send your automobile for me."

"Ah--my automobile!" echoed the woman on a higher note, and laughed,
with a flash of white teeth between carmined lips. "It pleased you?"

"Oh, yes, it is splendid!" the girl declared, in sincere praise. "It
is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen."

"I enjoy it very much--that automobile!" said the other, again
laughing, with a quick turn of her eyes toward the brother.

Negligently, rather caressingly, the young man murmured a few
Turkish words. She shrugged and leaned back in her chair, the flash
of animation gone. "And Cairo--that pleases you?" she asked of
Arlee.

Stumbling a little in her French, but resolutely rushing over the
difficulties, Arlee launched into the expression of how very much it
pleased her. Everything was beautiful to her. The color, the sky,
the mosques, the minarets, the Nile, the pyramids--they were all
wonderful. And the view from the Great Pyramid--and then she
stopped, wondering if that were not beyond her hostess's experience.

In confirmation of the thought the Turkish lady smiled, with an
effect of disdain. "Ascend the pyramids--that is indeed too much for
us," she said. "But nothing is too much for you Americans--no?"

Her curious glance traveled slowly from Arlee's flushed and lovely
face, under the rose-crowned hat, down over the filmy white gown and
white-gloved hands clasping an ivory card case, to the small,
white-shod feet and silken ankles. Arlee did not resent the
deliberate scrutiny; in coming to gaze she had been offering herself
to be gazed upon, and she was conscious that the three of them
presented a most piquant group in this dim and spacious old room of
the East--the modern American girl, the cosmopolitan young officer
in his vivid uniform, and this sequestered woman, of a period of
transition where the kohl and henna of the _odalisque_ contrasted
with a coiffure and gown from Paris.

Slowly and disconnectedly the uninspiring conversation progressed.
Once, when it appeared halted forever, Arlee cast a helpless look at
the Captain and intercepted a sharp glance at his sister. Indeed,
Arlee thought, that sister was not distinguishing herself by her
grateful courtesy to this guest who was brightening the _tristesse_
of her secluded day, but perhaps this was due to her Oriental
languor or the limitations of their medium of speech.

It was a relief to have the Captain suggest music. At their polite
insistence Arlee went to the piano and did her best with a piece of
MacDowell. Then the sister took her turn, and to her surprise Arlee
found herself listening to an exquisite interpretation of some of
the most difficult of Brahms. The beringed and tinted fingers
touched the notes with rare delicacy, and brought from the piano a
quality so vivid and poignant in appeal that Arlee could dream that
here the player's very life and heart were finding their real
expression.

The last note fell softly into silence, and with her hands still on
the keys the woman looked up over her shoulder at her brother,
looked with an intentness oddly provocative and prolonged. And for
the first time Arlee caught the quality of sudden and unforeseen
attraction in her, and realized that this insolence of color, this
flaunting hair and painted mouth might have their place in some
scheme of allurement outside her own standards.... And then suddenly
she felt queerly sorry for her, touched by the quick jarring
bitterness of a chord the woman suddenly struck, drowning the
laughing words the Captain had murmured to her.... Arlee felt
vaguely indignant at him. No one wanted to have jokes tossed at her
when she had just poured her heart out in music.

The Captain was on his feet, making his adieux. Now that the ladies
were acquainted, he would leave them to discuss the modes and other
feminine interests. He wished Miss Beecher a delightful trip upon
the Nile and hoped to see her upon her return, and she could be sure
that everything would be arranged for her. When she had had her tea
and wished to leave, the motor would return her to the hotel. He
made a rapid speech in Turkish to his sister, bowed formally to
Arlee over a last _au revoir_ and was gone.

Immediately the old woman entered with a tray of tea things, the
same old woman who had been squatting by the window, but who had
noiselessly left the room during the music. She was followed by a
bewitching little girl of about ten with another tray, who remained
to serve while the old woman shuffled slowly away. Arlee was struck
by the informality of the service; the servants appeared to be
underfoot like rugs; they came and went at will, unregarded.

The tea was most disappointingly ordinary, for the pat of butter
bore the rose stamp of the English dairy and the bread was English
bake, but the sweetmeats were deliciously novel, resembling nothing
Arlee had seen in the shops, and new, too, was the sip of syrup
which completed the refreshment.

Her hostess had said but little during the repast, remaining silent,
with an air of polite attention, her eyes fixed upon her caller with
a gaze the girl found bafflingly inscrutable. Now as the girl rose
to go, the Turkish woman suddenly revived her manners of hostess and
suggested a glimpse of some of the other rooms of the palace. "Our
seclusion interests you--yes?" she said, with a half-sad,
half-bitter smile on her scarlet lips, and Arlee was conscious of a
sense of apologetic intrusion battling with her lively curiosity as
she followed her down the long chamber and through a curtained
doorway to the right of the throne-like chair, into a large and
empty anteroom, where the sunlight streaming through the lightly
screened window on the wall at the right reminded Arlee that it was
yet glowing afternoon.

She lingered by the window an instant, looking down into the court
which she had glimpsed from the vestibule. Across the court she saw
a row of windows which, being unbarred, she guessed to be on the
men's side of the house, and to the left the court was ended by a
sort of roofed colonnade.

Her hostess passed under an elaborate archway, and Arlee followed
slowly, passing through one stately, high-ceiled, dusty room into
another, plunged again into the twilight of densely screening
_mashrubiyeh_. There were views of fine carving, painted ceilings,
inlaid door paneling, and rich and rusty embroideries where the name
of Allah could frequently be traced, but Arlee was ignorant of the
rare worth of all she saw; she stared about with no more than a
girl's romantic sense of the old-time grandeur and the Oriental
strangeness, mingled with a disappointment that it was all so empty
and devoid of life.

This part of the palace was very old, her hostess said
uninterestedly; these were the rooms of the dead and gone ladies of
the dead and gone years. One of the Mamelukes had first built this
wing for his favorite wife--she had been poisoned by her rival and
died, here, on that divan, the narrator indicated, with a negligent
gesture.

Wide-eyed, Arlee stared about the empty, darkened rooms and felt
dimly oppressed by them. They were so old, so melancholy, these
rooms of dead and gone ladies. How much of life had been lived here,
how much of hope had been smothered with these walls! What aching
love and fiery hate had vibrated here, only to smolder into helpless
ennui under the endless weight of tedious days.... She shivered
slightly, oppressed by the dreams of these ancient rooms, dreams
that were heavy with realities.

Slowly she moved back after her hostess, who had pushed back a
panel in one wall, and Arlee stepped beside her within the tiny,
balcony-like enclosure the panel had revealed, one side of which was
a wooden lace-work of fine screening, permitting one to see but not
be seen. Pressing her face against the grill, Arlee found she was
looking down into a long and spacious hall, lined with delicate
columns bearing beautiful, pointed arches, and brilliant with old
gilding and inlay.

This was the colonnade which she had seen forming one side of the
court; it was the hall of banquets, she was told, and connected this
wing of the palace, the _haremlik_, with the _selamlik_, the men's
wing, across the way. Here in old times the lord of the palace gave
his feasts, and this nook had been built for some favorite to view
the revels.

Arlee stared down into the great empty hall with an involuntary
quickening of the breath. How desolate it was, but how beautiful in
its desolation! What strange revels had taken place there to the
notes of wild music, what girls had danced, what voices had shouted,
what moods had been indulged! She thought of the men who had made
merry there ... and then she thought of the women, generations of
women, who had stood where she was standing, pressing their young
faces against the grill, their bright eyes peering, peering down.
She felt their soft little silken ghosts all about her, their
bangles clinking, their perfumes enveloping her sense--lovely little
painted dolls, their mimic passions helpless in their hearts....

Dreaming, she turned and in silence retraced her way after her
hostess, loitering by the window in the anteroom to watch a veiled
girl drawing water at the old well in the center, an old well rich
in arabesques.

How much happier, thought Arlee, were these serving maids in the
freedom of their poverty than the cloistered aristocrats behind
their darkened windows. She wondered if that strange figure beside
her, half Moslem, half modern, envied the little maid the saucy jest
which she flung at a bare-footed boy idling beside a dozing white
donkey. As she watched the old-world quiet of the picture was
broken. Some one, the doorkeeper, she thought, from his vivid robes
and yellow shoes, came running across the court, shouting something
at the girl which sent her flying to the house, her jar forgotten,
and another man, an enormous Nubian with blue Turkish bloomers,
short red jacket and a red fez, hurried across the court toward the
_haremlik_.

The lady stepped toward the screening and called down; the man
stopped, raised his head, and shouted back a jargon of excited
gutturals, waving his arms in vehement gesturing. His mistress
interrupted with a brief question, then with another, then nodding
her head indifferently to herself, she called down an order,
apparently, and turned away.

"One of our servants is dead," she murmured to Arlee in explanation.
"They say now it is the plague."

"The plague?" repeated the girl absently. She was thinking what a
hideous creature that great Nubian was. Then, more vividly, "The
_plague_?"

"You have fear?" said the negligent voice.

Arlee nodded frankly. "Oh, yes, I should be terribly afraid of it,"
she averred. "Aren't you?" And then she reflected, as she saw the
inscrutable smile playing about the older woman's lips, that she
must be witnessing that fatalistic apathy of the East that she had
read about.

But there was nothing apathetic about the Captain. He followed on
the very heels of the announcement, his sword clanking, his spurs
jingling, as he bounded up the stairs and hurried through the long,
dim drawing-room toward them.

"You have heard?" he cried in English as they came to meet him. "You
have heard?"

"Of the plague!" Arlee answered, wondering at his agitation. "Yes,
your sister just told me. Is it really the plague?"

"So say those damned doctors--pardon, but they are such imbeciles!"
He made an angry gesture with his clenched hand. His face was tense
and excited. "They say so. And there is another sick ... _Dieu_,
what a misfortune! Truly, there was illness about us, a little, but
who thought----"

"I shall run back to my hotel," said Arlee lightly, "before I catch
one of your germs."

"To the hotel--a thousand pardons, but that is the thing forbidden."
The young man made a gesture, with empty palms outspread, eloquent
of rebellion and despair. "Those doctors--those pig English--they
have set a quarantine upon us!"




CHAPTER IV

A SORRY GUEST


"A quarantine?" said Arlee Beecher, in a perfectly flat little
voice.

Again the young man exercised his power of gesture, his dark eyes
seeming to plead his own helpless desire to mitigate his words.

"Truly a quarantine. It is tyranny, but what can one do? They will
hear nothing--they set their guard and it is finished--_bien
simple_. We are their prisoners."

"Prisoners?" Her mind appeared but a hollow echo of his words. Her
heart was dropping, dropping sickishly, into unending space. Then
meaning stabbed her like a dentist's needle, and a pandemonium of
incredulity and revolt clamored through every nerve in her body.
"Why you can't mean--I'm going back to the hotel this instant! I
haven't seen your servant!"

"That is nothing to them. They have no reason--heads of pigs! No one
must leave or they shoot--the tyrants, the imbecile tyrants! But
their day will not be forever--Islam will not endure----"

It was of no moment to Arlee Beecher what Islam would not endure.
Her heart was galloping now like a runaway horse, but her voice rang
with quick reaction from that first sickening shock.

"What nonsense," she said positively. "They wouldn't shoot _me_. Why
didn't you call me when the English doctor was here. I could have
explained then. But now--now I had better telephone, I suppose.
Either to the doctor or the English ambassador--or the American
consul. I'll make them understand in a jiffy. Where is your
telephone, please?"

"Alas, not in the palace." The young captain's look of regret
deepened.

"But--but you telephoned your sister! You telephoned her this
afternoon."

"Ah, yes, but I spoke to a telephone which is in a palace near
here--the palace of my uncle. I sent a servant with the message. But
I can send a message to that palace," he offered eagerly, "and they
can telephone for you. Or I can send notes out to all the people you
wish. The soldiers will call boys to deliver them."

Across the girl's perfectly white face a tremor of panic darted;
then she bit her lips very hard and stared very intently past the
Captain's green and gold shoulder. She had totally forgotten the
sister who had sunk on a divan beside them, her brown eyes rimmed in
their dark pencilings turning from one to the other as if to read
their faces.

"I'll just speak to those soldiers, myself," said Arlee decidedly.
"I'll make them understand." She left them there, their eyes upon
her and sped down the long room to the door which the Captain's
hurried entrance had left half open. She disappeared down the steps.

In three minutes she was back, a flame in the frightened white of
her cheeks, a flame in the frightened blue of her eyes.

"Captain Kerissen," she called, and he took a step nearer to her,
his face alert with sympathy, "Captain Kerissen, that is a _native_
soldier! He is at the bottom of the stairs--with a bayonet--and he
will not let me pass. He doesn't know a word I say. Please come and
tell him."

"Miss Beecher, it is useless for me to tell him anything," said the
young Turk with a ring of quiet conviction. "I have been talking to
that one--and to the others. They are at every entrance. It is as I
told you--we are prisoners."

"Surely you can tell him that I am a guest--you can _bribe_ him to
turn his head, to let me slip by----"

"He would be shot if he let you out that street door. He has his
orders to keep the ladies in their quarters and it is death to him
to disobey. That is the discipline--and the discipline has no
mercy--particularly upon the native soldiers." His tone held
bitterness. "It is useless to resist the soldiers. You must resign
yourself to remain a guest until I can obtain word to one who can
render assistance.... Will it be so hard?" he added sympathetically,
as she stood silent, her lips pressed quiveringly together. "My
sister will do everything----"

"Of course I can't stay here," broke in Arlee in her clear, positive
young tones. "I must get back to the Evershams--and we are going up
the Nile to-morrow morning. Can you get a message to that doctor _at
once_? And have someone go and telephone from the next house to the
consul and ambassador--and I'll write them notes, too."

Her voice broke suddenly. On what wings of folly she had come alone
to this place! Her bright adventure was a stupid scrape. Oh, what
mischance--what mischance! She was chokingly ashamed of the
predicament--to be penned up by a quarantine in a Moslem household.
She was angry, defiant and humiliated at once. What would the
Evershams say--and Robert Falconer----

       *       *       *       *       *

She had never waited for anything as she waited for the answers to
the passionately urgent notes she sent out. She had written the
doctor, the ambassador, the consul, the Evershams. And then she
walked up and down, up and down that long, dim room which grew
darker and darker with the fading light and counted off the seconds
and the minutes and the hours with her pulsing heart beats. She had
never known there was such suspense in the world. It was comparable
to nothing in her girl's life--the only faint analogy was in the old
school-time when she thought she had failed in the history
examination and her roommate had gone to the office to find out for
her. She remembered walking the floor then, in a silly panic of
fear. But she had not failed--she had just squeaked through and it
would be like that now. Someone would come to tell her that
everything was all right and laugh with her at her foolish fright.
But underneath this strain of fervent reassurance ran a cold little
current like an underground brook, a seeping chill of dread and
vague fear and strange amazement that she should be here in this
lonely palace, peering out of darkened windows, waiting and
listening.

This time it _was_ the Captain's steps, coming up the stairs.
Perceptive of her impatience, he had left her to herself, till he
could bring word. Now she stood, listening to the nearing jingle
that accompanied his footsteps, her hands clasped involuntarily
against her breast in rigid tension. And when she saw his face
through the dusk, saw the courteous deprecation of it, the
solicitous sympathy, she did not need his words to tell her that it
was not yet all right.

There was nothing to be done. Legal and medical authorities united
in insisting that no one, not even the guest, should leave the
palace until the fear of spreading the infection was past. This
might be modified in a day or two, but for the present they were too
frightened to make exceptions.

And they were going up the Nile Friday morning, Arlee remembered
numbly. And this was Thursday night.

"Did the Evershams--did they answer my letter?" she said with dry
lips.

The Evershams, it seemed, had not been at the hotel. Perhaps when
they had read the letter they would be able to do something about
it.

"They'll just _talk_!" cried Arlee passionately, her breast heaving.

She wanted to scream, she wanted to rave, she wanted to fly down
the stairs and hurl herself recklessly against that barring bayonet.
But because there was pride and spirit behind her delicate
loveliness she shut the door hard upon those imps of hysteria and
with high-held head and palely smiling lips she thanked the Captain
for the hospitality he was extending in his sister's name. Yes,
thank you, she would rejoin them at dinner. Yes, thank you, she
would like to go to her room now.

A serving maid, called by her hostess, conducted her--the blue-robed
girl, she thought, that she had seen drawing water at the well. A
black shawl hung from her head and dangling in its folds the
_yashmak_ ready to be slipped on at the approach of the men before
whom she must appear veiled. Her bare feet were thrust into scarlet
slippers, and as she moved silver anklets were visible, hanging
loosely over slim, brown ankles. Shuffling slightly, yet with an
erectly graceful carriage, the girl led the way into the ante-room
again, pulled open one of the closed doors in the opposite wall and
passed up an encased staircase wrapped in darkness. They emerged
into the dusk of a long, dim hall, where hanging lamps from the
ceiling shed a mild luster and a strong smell of oil, and passing
one or two doors on the right, the maid pushed, open one that was
rich in old gilding.

Crossing the threshold Arlee felt that she was crossing the
centuries again into her own time.

The room was a glitter of white and rose; the windows, unscreened,
admitted the warm glow of late afternoon, and windows and doorway
and bed were smothered in rose and white hangings. A white
triple-mirrored dressing-table gleamed with gold and ivory pieces; a
white fur rug was stretched before a rose silk divan billowy with
plump pillows, and an open door beyond gave a view of shining tile
and a porcelain bath. Near her was a baby grand piano in white
enamel--reminding her of one she had seen in the White House--and
she noted absently a pile of gaudily covered music upon it
betokening tunes different from the Brahms she had heard downstairs.

The maid indicated a pitcher of hot water in the bathroom--evidently
pipes and faucets played no part with the shining tub--and then
stepped outside, closing the door.

After an instant's hesitation, Arlee took off her hat and bathed her
face and hands, then moved slowly to the dressing table to glance at
her hair. Hesitantly she picked up the shining brush and stared at
the flourish of an unintelligible monogram upon the back. Whose
brush was this? Whose room was she in? The place, vivid, silken,
scented, was fairly breathing with occupancy.

She laid down the brush without using it, touched her hair with
absent fingers, and crossed to the windows. She looked down into a
garden, a deep tangle of a garden, presided over by a huge lebbek
tree that threw a pall of shadow upon the faintly moving flowers
beneath.

The place seemed a riot in neglect, for across the white sanded
paths thick creepers had flung their arms, and vines and climbers
were scaling the gnarled limbs of the acacia trees and covering the
high walls beyond. She was looking to the west where the rose and
gold of sunset still hung breathless on the painted air, though the
sun was hidden below the fringe of palms which rose above the wall,
and for a moment that still brilliance of the sky above the sharply
silhouetted palms made her heart quicken in forgetfulness.

And then her hands became aware of the bars she had been
unconsciously clasping, white-painted bars extending across the
window. They were of iron.

Not even here was there freedom, she thought with a throb of dread,
not even here where one faced dark gardens and blank walls and the
empty west.

       *       *       *       *       *

Somehow that dinner had passed, that queer dinner in the candle
light between the silent, painted woman and the politely talkative
young man, and passed without a word from outside for the girl whose
nerves were fraying with the suspense. The old woman and the little
girl had served them with a meal which would have been judged
delicious in any European hotel and though Arlee's nerves were
tricky her young appetite was not and she ate and talked with a
determined little air of trying to dissipate the strangeness of the
situation.

And with the coffee came inspiration. She began to plan ... half
listening to the Captain's amiable efforts to entertain her with an
account of the palace, and of its history under Ismail, the Mad
Khedive, who had occupied it for some months, tearing down and
building in his feverish way, only to weary at the first hint of
completion. She was wondering why in the world the inspiration had
not arrived at once. Perhaps something in this fatalistic air, this
stupid acceptance of authority had numbed her.

With alacrity she accepted the Captain's suggestion of a stroll in
the garden, and was relieved when the silent sister did not rise to
accompany them, but remained in the candle-light with her coffee and
cigarette. She found the woman's lightly mocking, watchful eyes, the
enigmatic smile upon the carmined lips, increasingly hard to bear.
That woman didn't like her--she had failed, somehow, to propitiate
her hostile curiosities.

Back through the old empty rooms of the past, the Captain led her,
and passing by the screened alcove from which Arlee had looked down
into the ancient banquet hall he came to a small dark painted door
which he unlocked. The door opened upon a flight of worn and narrow
stone steps descending into the garden.

       *       *       *       *       *

It had been night in the palace of darkened windows but in the
garden it was yet day, although the rose and gold of sunset had
faded to paling pinks and translucent ambers and in the east the
stars were shining in the deepening blue. It was the same garden on
which her windows opened; Arlee recognized the huge lebbek tree in
the center, the row of acacias, and the palms against the farthest
wall. It was a very old garden. Those trees must have seen many,
many years, she thought, and felt again that sense of vague
oppression and melancholy which the lonely rooms of the palace had
given her; that row of acacias which cast such crooked shadows over
the path had been planted by very long-ago hands.

So she thought fleetingly, then stared about, her concern for other
things. Captain Kerissen lighted a cigarette; over his cupped hands
his eyes followed hers searchingly.

"That is the hall of banquets?" she said, pointing to the raised
colonnade.

"Ah, yes--you are quick to learn!" he complimented.

"And could we walk through that into the courtyard?"

"Undoubtedly."

"And this side is the _haremlik_," she murmured, glancing up at the
windows upon the third floor which she felt were those of that rose
and white room. Much of the rest of the wing, she saw, extending
down to the high wall at right angles to it, was in a ruinous and
dilapidated condition. "What is there?" she asked.

"The rooms the Khedive Ismail left unfinished. They are of no use."

"And on the other side?" she persisted, pointing towards the wall
that was the continuation of the men's wing, which stopped at the
colonnade.

"On the other side is the palace of another man, and on the other
side of that, ending the road is a _cimitère_--what you say,
cemetery."

"And back of _that_ wall?" She nodded at the one behind the palms,
running parallel to the banquet hall.

"Back of that a canal, Mademoiselle, and across are other
palaces.... You study the geography, it appears?"

"Indeed I do!" She turned towards him, her face bright with
eagerness. Her light curls were blown about her forehead by a
breeze, hot and dry, that seemed to mingle the odors of the desert
with a piercing sweetness which it drew from the deep throats of the
lilies swaying beside the path. "And I think _that_ is going to be
the way out for me." Her quick nod was for the wall behind the
palms. "I want you to do me a great big favor, Captain Kerissen,
that will make me your debtor for life! You must help me break out
of this quarantine this very night?"

Not the ghost of a fear of failure to persuade him lurked in those
bright, dancing eyes. Not the ghost of a fear of failure haunted
those confident, smiling lips.

He sucked on his cigarette a moment, then slowly blew a thin ring of
blue smoke. He appeared interested in watching it.

"What is it--this idea?" he murmured.

"Well, you may have a better one but mine is just to climb that
wall, as soon as it gets dark. If you just get a ladder, or a pile
of chairs I am sure I can manage it--and then I'll be back at the
hotel in an hour!"

He took out his cigarette and shook his head at her. "You would
drop, like the plum of Haydee, into the arms of the soldier who is
guarding on the other side.... Shall I tell you the story of that
plum?"

"A soldier guarding--a _native_ soldier?"

"Yes."

"Then--then please won't you see if you can bribe him?" she
shamelessly pleaded, anxiously clasping and unclasping her hands.
"_Please_, Captain Kerissen, you must help me to run away to-night.
I _can't_ be shut up like this--I can't give up the Nile trip and
besides--Oh, I really must be back at that hotel to-night!... If
that soldier is sure no one else will see him I know you can
persuade him to look away just a little minute while I slip down and
run off!"

"Ah, no, no, my dear Miss Beecher, there is no hope of that." The
young man started walking down the path and Arlee walked beside him,
her eyes fixed on his face, incredulous of the denial that they were
reading there. "He would think it a test, a trap--not for one minute
is it to be thought of! Now could I let you go alone in that place
by the canal. There is danger--you do not understand----"

"Oh, I understand, but I can take care of myself!" Across her
pleading flashed the ironic thought of how excellently she had taken
care of herself in coming there that very afternoon! "Just let me
get over that wall and I can find my way--and if you cannot bribe
the man we can wait till it is darker and then, when he is at the
other end, why I can be down and off in a jiffy!"

"He would shoot," said the Captain. "He has his order. I have talked
with them.... And what would the authorities say when they send here
the doctor to-morrow and you are gone?"

"Say--say--Oh, what does it matter what they say? Tell them that I
ran away without your knowledge. Surely----"

"But your name has been given as detained. They would not let you
reappear in the world----"

"You leave that to me! I know it would be all right--once I was
there. Please do this for me, Captain Kerissen--_please_! I know
that in a great palace like this there must be many, many ways where
one could slip into the streets----"

"In all this palace there are but three doors--the door in the
vestibule by which you entered, the great door to its right, under
the arch into the court, and the little door from the garden to the
canal." He waved his cigarette at the wall ahead of them, towards
which they were slowly walking. "And all those three doors are
barred upon the outside and there is a soldier before each one--and
the soldier that you saw within the vestibule, watching us there."

"But--but the windows." She remembered the _mashrubiyeh_, but went
on resolutely, "I mean, the windows on the men's side. Aren't there
any windows in that part which are open?"

"The _selamlik_ is a short wing and looks into the court." A note of
impatience sounded in his voice. He tossed away his cigarette which
fell, a burning spark, in the shadows. Already, as they talked, it
had grown darker, and the impatient tropic night was stealing on
them. "It is no use," he repeated. "There is no way out for you--or
any of us."

Into her heart stole the unthinkable perception that he did not want
to help her--he was afraid of the authorities--or else--or
else--Desperately she returned to the appeal.

"But do let me try to get over that wall. I will watch for the
soldier--I will take the responsibility. Please, now--let us plan
that attempt."

His answer held a quiet finality. "It is impossible.... And the wall
is too high for such little feet."

The startled color flashed into her cheeks. Only Oriental language
of course.... Perhaps she was unduly sensitive to any hint of
familiarity in her predicament.

"I could manage it perfectly," she said with coldness.

He bent over her, as they walked. "Are you so unhappy here?"

"Of course I am unhappy," she gave back with a clear
matter-of-factness that strove to ignore the sudden softening of his
voice. "I am _very_ unhappy. I realize that I should not be here,
that I am intruding upon your hospitality----"

"You are making me most happy."

"And I am making my friends most anxious and losing my trip on the
Nile."

"The Nile," he said, "flows on forever. Who knows how soon you will
see it and under what happier circumstances?"

"Our boat was to sail at ten. I simply must find a way out
to-night----"

"That is impossible." He spoke with sudden irritation, which he
softened the next instant, with a light laugh. "You Americans--how
you hurry!... Tell me--have you no heart for all this?"

She looked about her at the silent garden, the deepening shadows,
the darkening sky. Above her head, now, high in the air were the
faintly rustling palm leaves. Behind the palms stretched the wall,
high and blankly impassable. She felt strange, unreal.... Her very
fright was unreal.

"Tell me," he was saying, his voice low and caressing, "are there
many girls like you--in your America?"

She tried to speak quite easily, quite simply. "You have been in
England and France, Captain Kerissen, and you have seen many
Americans traveling there."

"I have seen many--yes. But not like you." She looked swiftly at
him, then more swiftly away. His eyes were glowing with a look of
deep excitement; his teeth flashed white under his small, dark
mustache. "Shall I tell you how you appear beside those others?"

"No, thank you," the girl answered with a hurried crispness which
brought a stare and then a low laugh from him.

"You have been told so often?" he suggested.

"I never permit myself to be told at all!" Anger made her young
voice imperious, but her heart was beating furiously. Involuntarily
she quickened her steps and he reached his hand to her bare forearm
and held her back.

"Pardon--but you are too quick."

She stood rigid, some deep instinct warning her not to resist. The
situation had gone to the man's head, she felt dumbly; his courtesy
was only a scant veneer over that Oriental cast of view which, like
the Latin, reads every accident of propinquity as opportunity. His
hand fell away and they walked on in slower time. When he spoke his
voice betrayed the feeling quickening within him.

"Then I have a pleasure before me, for you will listen, please. To
me your sister Americans are like big, bright flowers which grow by
the wayside where every wind blows hard upon them. And each receives
the dust of the footsteps of many men till comes the one who shall
possess her. But he does not bear her away. He puts his name upon
her, but leaves her out in the same field where every passerby may
look and handle----"

"You are dreadfully rude," said Arlee clearly. "You don't understand
at all. I thought you knew better."

"Ah, I know! Was I not in England and did I not hear men talk--yes,
of sisters and wives with bold words and laughter? Not so of our
ladies--they are sacred names not to be spoken by another.... But I
do not wish to speak of these others of your race. I speak of you."

"Really, I would rather you would not speak of me."

"But I wish to tell you." His voice was no louder; it was even
lower, but it took on a note of authority. Arlee was silent, a chill
creeping up about her heart--like a rising tide....

"You are a flower upon a height," he said, and his tones were soft
again and gently caressing, "laughing at others because you know you
are so high above them, and so proud. The blue of the skies is in
your eyes, and the gold of the sun in your hair. You have a beauty
that is too bright to be endured--it burns a man's heart like a
flame.... It was never meant to shine in a common field. It must be
guarded, revered, adored--a princess upon a height----"

"You have an Oriental imagination," said Arlee Beecher, and prayed
God her voice did not tremble. "I must ask you not to pay me such
compliments while I am your guest."

"No?... Why not?"

"They--are embarrassing."

"Embarrassment is an emotion rare to find among your ladies--it is
the dewy bloom upon your own perfect innocence.... Ah, I wish you
spoke my language! I could tell you many things----"

"Your English is excellent," said the white-faced girl. "Did you
learn it at Oxford or before?"

He did not pause for such foolish questionings. "Why do you not wish
me to tell you what you are?" he said reproachfully. "Is it because
you doubt that I mean it?"

"Because I am not used to such compliments--and I would rather not
hear them now. I am your guest and I am very tired. I must go in."

It was very dark in the garden. And it was still and unutterably
lonely. Only the stars burned above them in the heavens; only the
light wind of the desert stirred. From the far distance the muffled
beat of the tom-tom sounded. Surely, thought Arlee, surely she was
dreaming.... This could not be Arlee Beecher, here with this
man--this Turk.

"I must go in," she repeated, with a heightening of assurance.

As he looked down at her for a moment that chill dread seemed to
lay its icy hands on her very heart as she glimpsed something of the
tumult within his eyes. She had a vision of him as a man capable of
all, reckless, impassioned, poised upon the brink of some desperate
plunge.... Then the hands of consequences seemed to lay compelling
hold upon him; the fire was extinguished; the vision gone like a
mirage. His eyes were friendly, his lips smiling, as he bowed to
her, in deferential courtesy, to all appearances a gentleman of her
world.

"I must not tire my guest," he said, and stood aside to let her pass
up the narrow stone steps.

"We shall have other walks," he added, and the chill, delicate
menace of those words went with Arlee Beecher to the rose and white
room, and kept her sorry company through the long and restless
hours.




CHAPTER V

WITHIN THE WALLS


Again the knocking, muffled but softly insistent, and Arlee's eyes,
heavy with tardy sleep, came slowly open, resting blankly on the
glittering strangeness of the room. The daylight was streaming in
the wide windows, striking brightly on the white enameled furniture
which had glimmered so ghost-like through the wakeful darkness of
the night, and flung back in dancing points of color from the
mirrors and the glass and gold of toilet pieces. The air was hot and
close, as if the first freshness of the morning was already past.

Again through the heavy door came the knocking and the soft
reassurance of a girl's voice. Arlee sprang from the couch where she
had lain down that night, not undressed, but with her white frock
exchanged for the negligée she had found laid out for her among
other things, and hurried toward the door where she had piled two
chairs to supplement the lock--a foolish-looking barricade in the
shining light of day, she thought, her lips lifting whimsically.

The young Turkish maid entered with a huge jar of water which she
emptied into the bath, returning to the door to take in another and
yet another and another from some unseen porter, and pouring these
into the bath, she added a spray of perfume and laid out powders and
towels, smiling the while at Arlee, with the fascinated interest of
a child.

"Do you speak English?" said Arlee eagerly.

But the girl laughed and shook her head at the question, and at the
French and German with which Arlee next addressed her, and answered
in soft Turkish, at which it was Arlee's turn to laugh and shake her
head. But she felt a little rueful behind her pleasant smiling. She
wished she could talk with the girl. She wondered about her. She had
very handsome dark eyes, though perhaps overbold at times, but her
lips were thick and her nose was flattened as if generations of
_yashmak_-wearing women had crushed every hope of contour.

The cool freshness of the water was grateful to her senses. It was a
plunge back into sanity and normal life again, drowning those ghosts
of vague foreboding and anxieties which had kept such unpleasant
vigil with her, and when the Turkish girl returned with a tray,
Arlee was able to sit and eat breakfast with a trace of amusement at
the oddity of the affair--sipping coffee in this Parisian boudoir
overlooking an Egyptian garden.

As she was buttering a last crumb of toast the girl re-entered with
a box from the florist. Her white teeth flashing at Arlee in a smile
of admiring interest, she broke the cord with thick fingers and
Arlee found the box full of roses, creamy pink and dewy fresh. The
Captain's card was enclosed, and across the back of it he had
written a message:

      I am sending out for some flowers for our guest and I
      hope that they will convey to her my greeting. If there
      is anything that you would have, it is yours if it is in
      my power to give. My sister is indisposed, but will visit
      you when her indisposition will permit. This afternoon I
      will see you and report the result of our protests to the
      authorities. Until then, be tranquil, and accommodate
      yourself here.

A tacit apology, thought Arlee, pondering the dull letter a moment,
then dropping it to touch the roses with light fingers. The young
man's wits had evidently returned with the sun. He had utterly lost
them last night with the starshine and the shadows and his Oriental
conception of the intimacy of the situation--but, after all, he had
too much good sense not to be aware of the folly of annoying her.
Her cheeks flushed a little warmer at the memory of the bold words
and the lordly hand on her arm, and her heart quickened in its
beating. She had certainly been playing with fire, and the sparks
she had so ignorantly struck had lighted for her an unforgettable
glimpse of the Oriental nature beneath all its English polish, but
she imagined, very fearlessly, that the spark was out. She was not a
nature that was easily alarmed or daunted; beneath her look of
delicate fragility was a very sturdy confidence, and she had the
implicit sense of security instinct in the kitten whose blithe days
have known nothing but kindness. Yet she felt herself tremendously
experienced and initiated....

She wrote back a word of thanks for the flowers and a request for
writing paper and ink, and when they were brought she wrote three
most urgent letters, and after an instant's hesitation a fourth--to
the Viceroy himself. Feeling that his mail might be bulky, she
marked it "Immediate" in large characters and gave them to the maid,
who nodded intelligently and shuffled away.

It was very odd, she thought then, that she had no letters. By now
the Evershams must surely have written--she had begged them to....
But she was _not_ going to be silly and panicky, she determinedly
informed that queer little catch in her side which came at the
thought of her isolation, and humming defiantly she sat down at the
white piano and opened the score of a light opera which she knew:

          Say not love is a dream,
            Say not that hope is vain ...

She had danced to that tune last night--no, the night before
last--danced to it with that extraordinarily impulsive young man
from home--for all America was now home to her spirit. And she had
promised to see him last night. She wondered what he had thought of
her absence.... She could imagine the Evershams dolefully deploring
her rashness, yet not without a totally unconscious tinge of proper
relish at its prompt punishment. They were such dismal old dears!
They _would_ complain--they must have made her the talk of the hotel
by now. Robert Falconer would enjoy that! And his sister and Lady
Claire would ask about her, and Lady Claire would say, "How
odd--fancy!" in that rather clipped and high-bred voice of hers....
But she was _not_ going to think about it!

She opened more music, stared wonderingly at the unfamiliar pages,
read the English translation beneath the German lines, then pushed
them away, her cheeks the pinker. They were as bad as French
postcards, she thought, aghast. Whose room was this, anyway? Whose
piano was this? Whose was the lacy negligée she had worn and the
gossamer lingerie the maid had placed in the chiffonier for her? Was
she usurping her hostess's boudoir?

She began to walk restlessly up and down the room, feeling time
interminable, hating each lagging second of delay.

Then came a tray of luncheon, and lying upon it a yellow envelope.
With an eagerness that hurt in its keenness she snatched it up and
tore out the folded sheet. Her eyes leaped down the lines. Then
slowly they followed them again:

      I think it very strange of you to leave us like that, but
      of course you are your own mistress. We are sorry and
      hope it will soon be over and you will join us again,
      unless you prefer your other friends, the Maynards. We
      have packed your clothes and sent them to Cook's for your
      orders, and we have paid your hotel bill. Let us know
      when you can join us.

                                   MRS. EVERSHAM.

That was all. No word of real sympathy--no declaration of help.
Passive acceptance of her predicament--perhaps indeed a retributive
feeling of its fitness for her folly. They were annoyed.... Packing
her clothes must have been a bother--so was paying her hotel bill.

She crumpled the telegram with an angry little hand. Evidently they
had done none of the telephoning she had begged of them. Surely
there would have been time for that, if only they had hurried a
little! She remembered with a sort of hopeless rage their maddening
deliberateness.... Well, they were gone off to the Nile--the
telegram, she saw, had been sent as they were on their way to the
boat--and she had nothing more to hope from them! But surely the
other people, the consul, the ambassador, the mysterious medical
authorities, would understand when they had read her letters.

She sent another note to the Captain, asking to be called when the
doctor came, and then she sat down at the little white table and
began again to write.

But not to Falconer. Never would she beg of him, never, she
resolved, with a tightening of her soft lips. She would never let
him know how miserable she was over this stupid scrape; when she
returned to the hotel she would carry affairs with a high hand and
hold forth upon the interesting quaintness of her experience and the
old-world charm of her hostess. She laughed, in angry mockery. Never
to him, after their quarrel, would she confess herself.

The letter was to a young man whose gray eyes she remembered as very
kind and whose chin as very vigorous. He would do things, she
thought. And he would understand--he was an American. And dimly she
felt that she didn't want him to think she had utterly forgotten
her promise of the evening before last, and she didn't want him to
be filled with whatever dismal impression the Evershams were giving
out. So she dwelt very lightly upon her annoyance at being detained,
and asked him please to see the consul or the English Ambassador or
somebody in power and hurry matters up a little, as her rightful
caretakers had taken themselves off to the Nile. And she said
nothing stupid about the strangeness of her writing to him after
only speaking to him twice and never being really presented. She
merely added, "Please hurry things--I hate being a prisoner," and
sealed and addressed it with a flourish to William B. Hill, and sent
it off by the maid, and felt oddly comforted by the memory of
Billy's vigorous chin.

The heat of the rose-and-white room was stifling now as the slant
sun of afternoon burned through the closed blinds and drawn
hangings. Languidly she curled up upon the sofa and pillowed her
heavy head on the scented silk, and so, drowsing with fitful dreams,
she lost the sense of the lagging hours.

She roused to find the maid at hand with more water jars, and, when
she had bathed, the girl reappeared and beckoned her to follow.
Perhaps the doctor was below, thought Arlee; perhaps the consulate
had sent for her! With flying feet she followed down the dark old
stairs and across the anteroom into the dim salon, only to find a
candle-lighted table set for dinner in the middle of the room and
Captain Kerissen bowing ceremoniously beside it.

In the blankness of her disappointment she scarcely grasped what he
was saying about the dinner hour being early and his sister being
indisposed. She interrupted with a breathless demand for news:

"And my letters--surely there has been time for answers!"

"Answers, yes," he replied, "but not such as I could wish for your
sake."

"You mean----?"

"The English have written to me and request that I cease to trouble
the department with my importunities. For I myself had written to
them again, that I might find grace in your eyes by accomplishing
your desires. They say to me that it is useless. The plague is more
serious than the convenience of my visitors, and all must be done
according to rule. When there is no danger you may depart."

The crash of hopes went echoing to the farthest reaches of her
consciousness. But pride stiffened her to dissemble, and she tried
to smile as she mechanically accepted the Captain's invitation to be
seated at the little candle-lighted table.

"There was no word to me personally?" she asked.

"None, but the telegram which came this morning. I judged that it
was not of a significance, for you did not send me a report."

"No--it was not of a significance," she repeated, with a ghost of a
little smile. "It was from the Evershams."

"Ah! Their condolences, I think?... And is it that they still make
the Nile trip?"

"Yes.... They went this morning." She spoke hesitantly, averse to
having this eager-eyed young host perceive how truly deserted she
was. "They expect me to take the express train later and join them."

"It is only a night's ride to Assouan." He spoke soothingly. "But
you are not eating, Miss Beecher. I recommend this consommé."

It was worth the recommending. Miss Beecher spooned it slowly, then
demanded, "Why was I not called when the doctor came?"

"But he does not come! Perhaps he is afraid"--the young man's brows
and shoulders rose expressively--"but certainly he does not risk
himself. If a servant is ill we are to tell a soldier and the sick
one will be taken away to the house of plague--_bien simple_. It is
so hard that I am helpless for you," he said, with sympathetic
concern, then added, with an air of boyish confession, "although I
do not deny that it is happiness for me to see you here."

The look in his eyes forced itself upon her. And the secret sense of
discomfort intruded like a third presence at the little table.

In a clear voice of dry indifference: "That's very polite of you,"
she remarked, "but I imagine you are pretty furious, too, to be kept
pent up in somebody else's house like this."

"But this is not somebody else's house," he smiled, his eyes
observant of her quick glance and look of confusion. "I am _chez
moi_."

"Oh! I thought--I was visiting your sister."

"My sister lives with me. She is a widow--and we are both alone."

"She does not seem to care for company."

"She is indisposed. She regrets it exceedingly." The young man
looked grave and solicitous. "But I trust your comfort is not being
neglected?"

"Oh, my comfort is being beautifully attended to, thank you, but my
patience is wearing itself out!" Arlee spoke with a blithe
assumption of humor.

"I wish that I could extend the resources of my palace for you."

"You must tell me about the palace. I shall want to picture it to my
friends when I tell them about it. It's very old, isn't it? It must
have seen a great deal of life."

"Ah, yes, it has seen life--and what life! _Quelle vie!_" A flash of
real enthusiasm dispelled the suave indolence of his handsome
features.

"Have you seen those old rooms? Those rooms that were built by the
Mamelukes? There is nothing now in Cairo like them."

"I thought them very beautiful," said the girl. "Tell me about those
Mamelukes who lived here."

"They were _men_," he said with pride, his eyes kindling, "men who
lived as kings dare not live to-day!" The subject of those old days
and those old ancestors of his was evidently dear to the young
modern, and he launched into an animated sketch of those times,
trying to picture for Arlee something of the glowing pageant of the
past. And as she listened she found her own high spirit stirring in
sympathy with the barbaric strength of those old nobles, riding to
battle on their fiery Arab steeds, waging their private wars,
brooking no affront, no command, working no other man's will.

"They knew both power and beauty," he declared, "like the Medici of
Florence. There are no leaders like that in the modern world. To-day
beauty is beggared, and power is lusterless.... And taste? Taste is
a hundred-headed Hydra, roaring with a hundred tongues!"

"While in the old days in Cairo it only roared with the tongues of
Mamelukes?" Arlee suggested, a glint of mischief in her smile.

He nodded. "It should be the concern of nobles--not of the rabble.
That is why I should hate your America--where the rabble prevail."

"It's not nice of you to call me a rabble," said Arlee, busy with
her plate of chicken. "But I want to hear more about your old
Mamelukes. Is the story true about the Sultan's being so afraid of
them that he had them taken by surprise and killed?"

"He did well to fear them," said Kerissen. "And he, too, was a
strong man who had the power to clear his own path. Those nobles
were in the path of Mohammed Ali. They were too strong for him, he
knew it--and they knew it and were not afraid. On one day they were
all assembled at the Citadel, at the ceremony which Mohammed Ali was
giving in honor of his son, Toussoum. It was the first of March, in
1811, and my ancestor, the father of my father's father, rode out
from this palace, through the gate by the court, which is the old
gate, in his most splendid attire to greet his sovereign's son. The
emerald upon his turban was as large as a man's eye, and his sword
hilt was studded with turquoise and pearls and the hilt was a blazon
of gold. His robes were of silk, gold threaded, and his horse was
trapped with gold and silver and a diamond hung between her eyes....
The Mamelukes were fêted and courted, and then, as they were leaving
the Citadel--you have been up there?" he broke off to question, and
Arlee nodded, her eyes wide and intent like a listening child's,
"and you recall that deep, crooked way between the high walls,
between the fortified doors? Imagine to yourself that deep way
filled with men on horseback, quitting the Citadel, having taken
leave of their Sultan--they were a picture of such pride and pomp as
Egypt has never seen again. And then the treachery--the great gates
closed before them and behind them, the terrible fire upon them from
all sides, the bullets of the hidden Albanians pouring down like the
hosts of death--the uproar, the cries of horses, the shouts of the
trapped men, and then all the tumult dying, dying, down to the last
moan and hiccough of blood."

"But one escaped?" questioned the girl, breaking the silence which
had followed the cessation of his voice. "Is it true that one really
escaped?"

"Anym-bey--yes, he was the only one that escaped that massacre. He
had a fierce horse which gave him pain to mount, and he was still in
the courtyard of the palace when he heard the outburst of shots and
then the cries. He comprehended. Stripping his turban from his head
he bound it over the eyes of his stallion and, spurring to a gallop,
he dashed out over the parapet of the Citadel and down--down--down!
Magnificent! He did not die of it, but alas! he did not escape.
Wounded as he was he managed to reach the house of a relative, but
the soldiers of the Sultan tracked him there and seized him.... He
was killed."

"Oh, the pity--after that splendid dash!" Arlee stopped and looked
around her, at the strange shadowy room hung with its old
embroideries and latticed with its ancient screening. "This room
makes it all so real, somehow," she murmured. "I didn't believe it
all when the dragoman told me--probably because he showed me the
mark of the horse's hoof in the stone of the parapet! I thought it
was all a legend--like the mark."

"Did he show you, too, the bulrush where Moses was found and the
indentures in the stones in the crypt of the Coptic Church where
Saint Joseph and Mary sat to rest after the flight into Egypt?"
laughed the Captain. And, with a teasing smile, "Ah, what imbeciles
they think you tourists!"

But Arlee merely laughed with him, while the old woman changed the
plates for dessert. Her spirits had brightened mercurially. This was
really interesting.... Uneasiness had vanished.

"Is that an old Mameluke throne?" she asked, pointing to the raised
chair upon the dais, with its heavy, dusty draperies.

The Captain glanced at it and shook his head, smiling faintly. "No,
that is the throne of marriage." He pushed away his sweet and
lighted a cigarette. "That is where sits the bride when she has been
brought to the home of her husband--there she holds her reception.
Those are the fêtes to which the English ladies come in such
curiosity." His smile was not quite pleasant.

"You cannot blame them for feeling a real--interest," said Arlee
hesitantly.

"Their interest--pah!" he flung back excitably and made a violent
gesture with his cigarette. "They peer at the bride with their
haggard eyes, and they say, 'What! You have not seen your husband
till to-day! How strange--how strange! Has he not written to you?
Suppose you do not like him,' and they laugh and add, 'Fancy a girl
among us being married like that!'... The imbeciles--whose own
marriages are abominations!"

For a moment Arlee was silent, instinct and impulse warring within
her. The man was a maniac upon those subjects, and it was madness to
exchange a word with him--but her young anger darted through her
discretion.

"They are _not_ abominations!" she gave back proudly.

"But I know--I know--have I not been at marriages in England?" he
declared, with startling fierceness. "Men and women crowd about the
bride; they press in line and kiss her; bearded mouths and shaven
lips, young and old, they brush off that exquisite bloom of
innocence which a husband delights to discover. Her lips are soiled,
_fanée_.... And then the man and woman go away together into a
public hotel or a train, and the people laugh and shout after them,
and hurl shoes and rice, with a great din of noise. I have heard!"
He stopped, looked a moment at the flushed curve of Arlee's averted
face, the droop of her shadowy lashes which veiled the confusion and
anger of her spirit, and then, leaning forward, his eyes still upon
her, he spoke in a lower, softer tone, caressing in its inflections.

"With us it is not so," he said. "We have dignity in our rejoicing,
and delicacy in our love. The bride is brought in state to the home
of her husband, no eyes in the street resting upon her, and there,
in his home, her husband welcomes her and retires with his friends,
while she holds a reception with hers. Later the husband will come
home and greet her, and he wooes her to him as tenderly as he would
gather a flower that he would wear. He is no rude master, no tyrant,
as you have been taught to think! He wins her heart and mind to him;
it is the conquest of the spirit!... I tell you that our men alone
understand the secret of women! Is not the life he gives her better
than what you call the world? The woman blooms like a flower for her
husband alone; his eyes only may dwell upon the beauty of her face;
for him alone, her lips--her lips----"

The young man's voice, grown husky, died away. A dreadful stillness
followed, a stillness vibrating with unspoken thought. Her eyes
lifted toward him, then fled away, so full of strange, dark,
desirous things was the look she encountered. Abruptly he rose--he
was coming toward her, and she struggled suddenly to her feet,
battling against the cold terror which held her dumb and unready.
She flung one arm out before her and found it grasped by hands that
were hot and burning. The touch shot her with a fierce rage that
cleared her brain and unlocked her lips.

"Is that--the conquest of the spirit?" she gasped, and for an
instant the white-hot scorn in her eyes, flashing into his, hid any
hint of the fear in her.

Involuntarily his grasp relaxed, and violently she wrenched her arm
away and stood facing him, a little white-clad image of war, her
eyes blazing, her breast heaving, a defiant child in her intrepidity
who gave him back look for look.

In his eyes there glowed and battled a conflict of desires. For one
moment they seemed flaming at her from the dark, like some wild
creature ready to spring; the next moment they were human,
recognizable. She read there grudging admiration, arrested ardor,
irresolution, dubiety, and secret calculation.

Then he put both hands behind him and bowed with ceremony.

"The spirit," he remarked dryly, "is worth the conquest."

She said proudly, "You would not like your English friends to know
how you treat a guest!"

At that she saw his lip curl in irony--at the mention of the
English, perhaps, or in disdain at the appearance of fearing a
threat, however powerful that threat might be. He answered with
calmness, "It is not the English I am considering.... Nor have I
treated my guest so ill, _chère petite mademoiselle_.... If for the
moment I mistook my cue--that look within your face--I ask grace for
my stupidity."

Suddenly she was frightened. He did not look like a man who wholly
surrenders his desires. His eyes seemed to say to her, "Wait--the
last word has not been spoken!" She felt her knees trembling.

With an effort she got out, "It is granted--but never again--must
you misunderstand. An American girl----"

She stopped. There was a lump in her throat. Across a bright,
familiar veranda she could hear a clear, sharp voice answer,
"American goose!" She saw a lean tanned face burn red with anger. A
wave of loneliness went through her. The irony of it was pitiless.
How right Robert Falconer had been!

He was staring down at the table beside him, frowning, considering.
She saw with peculiar distinctness how the cigarette he had dropped
had burned a hole in the fine linen. One of the candles was dripping
lopsidedly. She thought some one ought to right it. She wondered if
that soft step, hesitating, behind the curtains, was the serving
woman's, and she turned toward that doorway.

"I don't think I care for any coffee," she said, with an air of
careless finality. "I think I will go back to my room. Good
evening."

He followed her to the doorway, drawing aside the curtains as she
passed into the anteroom, and opening the door at the foot of the
steps, with an answering, "Good evening," and an added, "Till
to-morrow, Mademoiselle." And then, as the door closed below her,
she paused on the dark stairs and huddled against the wall,
listening to the faint footfalls from below, crossing and
recrossing. Then, when the silence seemed continual, she tiptoed
down the stairs again, softly pushed open the unlatched door, stole
across the anteroom to the curtained doorway and peered in.

The salon was empty, and in its center the supper table stood
stripped of its cloth and candles. Only the pale light from the
windows dispelled the growing dark. Like a little white wraith Arlee
fled through the room and turned the handle of the door at the head
of the _haremlik_ stairs. The door was locked.

She shook the handle, first cautiously, then with increasing
violence, then she ran back into the room to the nearest window,
staring down through the screen. It would have been a steep jump
down into the street, but her tense nerves would have dared it
instantly. Her hands tore at the _mashrubiyeh_, but the tiny
spindles and delicate curves held sound and firm. She beat against
it with fierce little fists; she leaped against it with all her
trifling weight. It did not yield an inch. Was there iron in all
that delicacy? Or was that old wood impregnable in its grim trust?

Wildly she glanced back into the room. Suppose she took a chair and
beat at this carving--could she clear a way before the servants
came? Could she take the jump successfully? She gazed down into the
street, estimating the fall, trying to calculate the hurt.

As she gazed, her eyes grew fixed and filled with utter amazement.
Down the street, on a black horse that arched his curving neck and
danced on light, fleet feet, rode a man in a uniform of green and
gold. He sat erect, his clear-cut profile toward her. The next
instant his horse, side-stepping at a blowing paper, turned his face
into view. It was Captain Kerissen.

Some one was stirring in the anteroom, and Arlee darted to the left
of the throne-chair and through the door there which stood ajar.
She was in a dim salon, like the one that she had left, but smaller,
and across from her was another door. She flew toward it, wild with
the hope of escape, and it opened before her eager hands.

From the shadows of the room it disclosed came a figure with a quick
cry. So suddenly it came, so tumultuously it threw itself toward her
that Arlee had a startled vision of bare arms, glittering with
jeweled bands, arrested outstretched before her as the low gladness
of the cry broke in an angry guttural. Slowly the arms dropped in a
gesture of despair. She saw a face, distorted, passionate, grow
haggard beneath its paint in the reversal of hope.

"Madame!" stammered Arlee to that strange figure of her hostess.
"Madame--Oh, pardon me," she cried, snatching at her French, "but
tell me how I can go away from here. Tell me----"

"_C'est toi--va-t-en!_" the woman answered in a voice of smothered
fury. She made a menacing gesture toward the door. "_Va-t-en_."
Suddenly her voice rose in a passion of angry phrases that were
indistinguishable to the girl, and then she broke off as suddenly
and flung herself down upon a couch. From behind her the old woman
came shuffling forth and put a hand on Arlee's arm, and Arlee felt
the muscles of that hand as strong and rigid as a man's. Utterly
confused and bewildered, the girl suffered herself to be led back
through the rooms to the foot of her stairs.

"Mariayah!" screamed the old woman, and after a moment the voice of
waiting-maid answered from above, and then as Arlee dumbly ascended
the stairs, the voice of the old woman rose with her in shrill
admonition.

It was the voice of a jailer, thought the white-lipped girl, and
that little, dark-skinned maid who waited upon her so eagerly, with
such sidelong glances of strange interest, was the tool of a jailer.
And though the turning of the key in her own hand gave her a
momentary sense of refuge from them, it was but a false illusion of
the moment. There was neither refuge nor safety here. She was being
deceived ...

The quarantine was lifted.

How else could the Captain be cantering down the street? He did
not look like a man escaping.... Perhaps he had bribed the
doorkeeper--that which he had declared impossible for Arlee....
But certainly he was deceiving her.

Like a swollen river bursting its banks, her racing mind, wild with
suspicion, surged out of its simple channels and swirled in every
direction.... What did he mean? What was he trying to do? Keep her
in ignorance of the outside world, detain her as long as he dared
while the Evershams' absence left her friendless, and inflict his
dreadful love-making upon her? Perhaps he thought that he could
fascinate her!

She laughed aloud, but it was such a ghostly little laugh that it
set her nerves jumping. She stopped in her feverish pacing of the
floor; she tried to control her racing mind, she tried to be very
calm and to plan.

Had he sent all those letters she had written? Steadily she stared
at the possibility that he had not. But at least the Evershams knew
where she was. Even the meager warmth of their telegram was like an
outstretched hand through the dark. She clung tight to it.

It was absurd to be frightened. He would never dare to annoy
her--never, in his sober senses. When they were alone together he
had lost his head, but that was accident--impulse...

She rolled the divan against the locked door. She piled two chairs
upon it.

No, of course, she had nothing really to fear from him. He was too
wise not to understand the gulf between them. To-morrow she would
confront him flatly with his deceit; she would array the power of
the authorities behind her race. She would sweep instantly from that
ill-omened palace. There would be no more philandering.

Her lips moved as she silently rehearsed the mighty speeches that
she would make, and all the while as she leaned there against a
window, staring strangely through the candle-light at the barricade
before the door, she could think of nothing but how mad and unreal
it all seemed--like some bad dream from which she would wake in an
instant.

But she did not wake. The dream persisted, and the iron bars across
her window were very tangible. Down below her in the garden the old
lebbek tree rustled stealthily in the stillness. Gusty clouds hid
the stars. In the distance the interminable tom-tom beat.

She cast herself into the bed and cried convulsively, like a
desperately frightened child, while the awful sense of terror and
utter loneliness seemed to be rolling over and over her, like an
unending sea. Her sobbing racked her from head to foot. She cried
until she was spent with weakness. Then, her wet face still pressed
against the pillow and her tangled hair flung out in disordered
curls, she fell at last into the deep sleep of exhausted youth.

She woke with a smothered cry. In the darkness a hand had touched
her.




CHAPTER VI

A GIRL IN THE BAZAARS


Billy slapped on his hat with a clap of violence. She might have
just _seen_ him! Then he got up and marched down the steps. There
was no more use in camping on that veranda. There was no more use in
guarding that entrance. When a girl went whirling off in a
limousine, "all dolled up" as his academic English put it, that girl
wasn't going to be back in five minutes. And anyway he'd be blessed
if he lay around in the way any longer like a doormat with "Welcome"
inscribed upon the surface.

So this spurt of masculine shame at his swift surrender to her, and
his masculine resentment at being ignored as she went by, sent him
hurrying down the street resolved not to return till dinner.

From habit his steps took him to the bazaars. But the zest of that
bright pageant was dulled for him. The color was gone even from the
red canopies, and the excitement had vanished from the din of
noises, the interest fled from the grave figures squatting in their
cubby holes of shops draped with silky rags or sewing upon scarlet
slippers. He listened apathetically to the warring shouts of the
donkey boys and the anathemas of a jostled water carrier stooping
under his distended goatskin, then dodged out of the way of a
goaded donkey and turned into one of the passages where the
four-footed could not penetrate.

For a few moments the bargaining over a silver bracelet between two
beturbaned and berobed Arabs caught the surface of his attention,
and as the wrangling became a bedlam of imprecations, and the
explosive gestures made physical violence a development apparently
of mere seconds, Billy's eyes brightened and he estimated chances.
But as he picked his favorite there was one final frenzy of fury,
and then--peace and joy, utter calm on the wild waters! One Arab
counted out the coins from a little leather bag about his neck and
the other passed over the bracelet, and with mutual salaams and
smiling speeches, behold! the affair was accomplished.

Disgustedly Billy turned away. Then on the other side of him he
heard a voice, a sweet and rather high voice, with a musical
intensity of inflection that was as English as the Union Jack.

"Yes, it's _sweetly_ pretty," the voice was saying irresolutely,
"but I don't think I _quite_ care to--not at _that_ price."

"I--I will buy it for you--yes?" said another voice. "It is made for
you--so 'sweetly pretty' as you say."

Billy turned. A slim, tall girl in a dark blue frock was standing
before a counter of Oriental jewelry, her head turned, with an air
of startled surprise, to the man on the other side of her who had
just spoken. He was a short, stout, blond man, heavily flushed,
showily dressed, with a fulsome beam in his light-blue eyes and an
ingratiating grin beneath his upturned straw-colored mustaches.

The girl turned her head away toward the shop-keeper and put back
the turquoise-studded buckle she held in her hand. "No, I do not
care for it," she said in a steady voice whose coldness was for the
intruder and turned away.

Billy had a glimpse of scarlet cheeks and dark lashed eyes before
the blond young man again took his attention.

"You do not like it--no?" he said, blocking her path, his face
thrust out to smile into hers. "But I buy you anything you wish--I
make you one present----"

The girl gave a quick look about. But she was in a pocket; for there
was no other exit to that line of shops but the path he was
blocking. All about her the dark-skinned venders and shoppers, the
bearded men, the veiled women, the impish urchins, were watching the
encounter with beady eyes of malicious interest.

Billy took a quick step forward and touched the man on the arm. "Let
this lady pass, please," he said.

The German confronted him with blood-shot blue eyes that ceased to
smile and clearly welcomed the belligerency.

"Gott! Who are you?" he derided. "Get out--get out the way."

"Get out yourself," said Billy, and stepping in front of the fellow
he extended a rigid arm, leaving a passage for the girl behind him.

"Oh, thank you," he heard her say, and as he half turned his head at
the grateful murmur he felt a sudden staggering blow on the side of
his face. He whirled about, on guard, and as the man struck again,
lunging heavily in his intoxication, Billy knocked up the fist as it
came.

"You silly fool!" he said impatiently, and as the man made a blind
rush upon him he caught him and by main force flung him off, but his
own foot struck something slippery and he lurched and went down,
with a wave of intense disgust, into the dirt of the bazaars. He
heard a chorus of cries and imprecations about him; he jumped up
instantly, looking for his assailant, but the German was clinging to
the front of the jewelry booth. "Meet you--satisfaction--honor," he
was saying stupidly.

A native policeman elbowed his way through the throng, urging some
Arabic question upon Billy, who caught its import and replied with
the few sentences of reassurance at his command, pointing to the
banana peel as the cause of all. A fat dragoman had suddenly
appeared from nowhere and was hurriedly attempting to lead away the
intoxicated one.

"You in charge of him? Take him to his hotel and throw him in the
tub," said Billy curtly, and the dragoman replied with profound
respect that he would do even as the heaven-born commanded.

Brushing off his clothes Billy shouldered his way out of the throng
and was met by two bright and grateful eyes and a slim, bare,
outstretched hand.

"Thank you _so_ much--I am _so_ sorry," said the musical voice.

"You shouldn't have waited," said Billy, with a prompt pressure of
the friendly little hand. "It might have been a real row."

"I couldn't run away," she said in serious protest at such
ingratitude. "I had to see what happened to you. And I am so sorry
about your clothes."

"Not hurt a particle--I chose a fortunate place to drop," he
returned lightly, but distinctly chagrined that he _had_ dropped.

"It was so fine of you," she answered, "just to parry him like
that--when he'd been drinking. I saw what you did." And then she
added, very matter-of-factly, "And I'm afraid your nose is bleeding,
too."

Billy put up a startled hand. In the general soreness he had not
noticed that warm trickle. His whole face turned as scarlet as the
shameless blood. Frantically he rummaged with the other hand.

The girl thrust a square of white linen upon him. "Please take
mine--it will ruin your clothes if it gets on them."

Her immense practicality refused to be embarrassed in the least.
Feeling immensely foolish Billy accepted hers, but then he
discovered his own handkerchief and stuffed hers away into his
pocket.

"You're a trump," he said heartily. "And it's all right now--all but
the swelling, I suppose." He sounded rueful. He had remembered his
engagement for the evening.

Her head a little aslant, the girl regarded him critically. "N-no,
it doesn't seem to be swelling," she observed. "Of course it's a
little red but that will pass."

They were walking side by side out of the narrow street and now, on
a crowded corner, they paused and looked around. "I left Miss
Falconer at the Maltese laces," she murmured, and to the laces they
turned their steps.

Miss Falconer was still bargaining. She was a middle aged lady,
Roman nosed and sandy-haired, and she brought to Billy in a rush the
realization that she was "sister" and the girl was Lady Claire
Montfort. The story of the encounter and Billy's hero part, related
by Lady Claire, appeared most disturbing to the chaperon.

"How awkward--how very awkward," she murmured, several times, and
Billy gathered from her covert glance upon him that part of the
awkwardness consisted in being saddled with his acquaintance. Then,
"Very nice of you, I'm sure," she added. "I hope the creature isn't
lingering about somewhere.... We'd better take a cab, Claire--I'm
sure we're late for tea."

"Let me find one," said Billy dutifully, and charging into the
medley of vehicles he brought forth a victoria with what appeared to
be the least villainous looking driver and handed in the ladies.

"Savoy Hotel, isn't it?" he added thoughtlessly, and both ladies'
countenances interrogated him with a varying _nuance_ of question.

"I remember noticing you," he hastily explained. "I'm not exactly a
private detective, you know,"--the assurance seemed to leave Miss
Falconer cold--"but I do remember people. And then I heard you
spoken of by Miss Beecher."

The name acted curiously upon them. They looked at each other. Then
they looked at Billy. Miss Falconer spoke.

"Perhaps we can drop you at your hotel," said she. "Won't you get
in?"

He got in, facing them a little ruefully with his damaged
countenance, and subtly aware that this accession of friendliness
was not a gush of airy impulse.

"You know Miss Beecher then?" said Miss Falconer with brisk
directness.

"Slightly," he said aloud. To himself he added, "So far."

"Ah--in America?"

"No, in Cairo."

Miss Falconer looked disappointed. "But perhaps you know her
family?"

"No," said Billy. He added humorously, "But I'll wager I could guess
them all right."

"Can you Americans do that for one another? That is more than we can
venture to do for you," said the lady, and Billy was aware of irony.

"We know so little about your life, you see," the girl softened it
for him, with a direct and friendly smile, and then gazed watchfully
at her chaperon. She was a nice girl, Billy decided emphatically.

"How would you construct her family?" was the elder lady's next
demand.

"Oh, big people in a small town," he hazarded carelessly. "The kind
of place where the life isn't wide enough for the girl after all her
'advantages' and she goes abroad in search of adventure."

"Adventure," repeated Miss Falconer thoughtfully. She seemed to
have an idea, but Billy was certain it was not his idea.

He hastened to clarify the light he had tried to cast upon his
upsetting little countrywoman. "All life, you know, is an adventure
to the American girl," he generalized. "She is a little bit more on
her own than I imagine your girls are," and for the fraction of a
second his eyes wandered to the listening countenance of Lady
Claire, "and that rather exhilarates her. And she doesn't want
things cut and dried--she wants them spontaneous and unexpected--and
people, just as people, interest her tremendously. I think that's
why she's so unintelligible on the Continent," he added
thoughtfully. "They don't understand there that girlish love of
experience as experience--enjoyment of romance apart from results."

"Romance apart from results," repeated Miss Falconer in a peculiar
voice.

"I don't believe you quite get me," said Billy hastily. He felt
foolish and he felt resentful. And if these English women couldn't
understand the bright, volatile stuff that Arlee was made of, he
certainly was not going to talk about it. But Miss Falconer had one
more question for him.

"When you say big people in a small town do you mean her father
would be a sort of country squire?"

"More probably a captain of industry," Billy smiled.

"A captain--Oh, that is one of your phrases!"

"One of our phrases," he laughed, and then parried, "I thought you
were acquainted with Miss Beecher?"

"Quite slightly," said Miss Falconer in an aloof tone. "My brother
came over on the same ship with her--he came to join us here."

Billy experienced a flood of mental light. The brother--at the hotel
he had discovered that his name was Robert Falconer--was coming to
join his elder sister and her young charge. He had come on the same
steamer as Miss Beecher. Ergo, he was staying at the hotel where
Miss Beecher was and not with his sister. Billy comprehended the
anxiety of the lady with the Roman nose. He looked at Lady Claire
with a certain sympathy.

He caught her own eyes reconnoitering, and they each looked hastily
away.

Again Miss Falconer returned to her attack. "Then you really know
nothing positive of Miss Beecher's family?"

"Nothing in the world," said Billy cheerfully. "But why not ask Miss
Beecher?"

The lady made no reply. "Miss Beecher is a beautiful girl," said
Lady Claire hastily. "She's _so_ beautiful that I suppose we are all
rather curious about her--of course people _will_ ask about a girl
like that!"

"Of course," said Billy, and Lady Claire, perceiving that he
resented this catechism about his young countrywoman, and Miss
Falconer perceiving that nothing was to be gotten out of him, the
conversation was promptly turned into other channels, the vague,
general channels of comment upon Cairo.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Evershams dined alone. Alternately, from their table to the
doorway went Billy's eager eyes, but no vision with shining curls
and laughing eyes appeared. Evidently she had stayed to dine with
whatever people she had gone to see. Robert Falconer was watching
that table, too.... Perhaps she would not return till late; perhaps
he would have only a tiny time with her that evening.... And he had
not been able to buy out that man's berth upon the steamer....

Consommé and whitebait, _boeuf rôti_ and _haricots vert_ and
_crême de cérises_ succeeded one another in deepening gloom. The
whole dinner over, and she had not appeared!

He went out to the lounge and smoked with violence. Presently he saw
the Evershams in the doorway talking to Robert Falconer, and he
jumped up and hurried to join them. As he approached he heard the
word Alexandria spoken fretfully by Mrs. Eversham.

"Good evening, good evening," said Billy hurriedly to the ladies,
and being a young man of simple directness, undeterred by the
glacial tinge of the ladies' response--they had not forgotten his
defection of the evening before when they were entertaining him so
nicely--he put the question which had been tormenting him all
evening, "Where is Miss Beecher to-night?"

"Alexandria," said Mrs. Eversham again, and this time there was a
hint of malicious satisfaction in her voice.

"Alexandria?" Billy was incredulous. "Why I--I understood she was to
go up the Nile to-morrow morning."

"She was, but she has changed her mind. She had word from some
friends of hers while we were out this afternoon and she flew right
off to join them."

"You mean she isn't going up the Nile at all now?"

"I haven't an idea what she is going to do. She is not in our care
any longer. And I don't suppose the boat company will do anything
about her stateroom at this late date--certainly she can't expect us
to go to any trouble about it."

"She left us half her packing to do," Clara Eversham contributed,
addressing Falconer with plaintive mien, "and her hotel bill to pay.
She is the most unexpected creature!"

Two young men silently and heartily concurred.

"What was her hurry?" Billy demanded.

"Oh, she's going camping in the desert with them--that sort of thing
would fascinate her, you know. Her telegram wasn't very clear. She
just sent a wire from the station, I think, or from Cook's, with
some money for her bill by the boy. So careless, trusting him like
that!"

"I don't suppose he brought it all," Mrs. Eversham declared. "You
see, she didn't say how much she was sending--just said it was
enough for her bill."

Billy looked at Falconer. He admired the stolidity of that
sandy-haired young man's countenance. He envied the unrevealing
blankness of his eyes.

"May I ask where she is stopping in Alexandria?" he persisted.

Mrs. Eversham shook her head. "She didn't give any address--the best
hotel, I suppose, whatever that is."

"The Khedivial," Falconer supplied.

"She just said to send her things to Cook's and to write to her
there and she would write when she came back. She had been expecting
to meet those friends, the Maynards, later, but we had no idea that
she was going to run off with them like this. It's very upsetting."

"We shall miss her," said Clara Eversham suddenly, with a note of
sincerity that made Billy warm to her a trifle. So he bestirred
himself getting their after dinner coffee and remembered to send
Mohammed for the cream for her, and listened with a show of
attention to their interminable anecdotes and corrections. But his
mind was off on the way to Alexandria....

Not a word of farewell. Of course, they had not exactly arrived, in
those twenty-four hours, at a correspondence stage, but still she
had made a positive engagement for that evening--and she had known
he was trying to buy that berth. Only that morning she had listened
to his account of his endeavors with a mischievous light in her blue
eyes and a prankish smile edging her pink lips ... and she might,
after that, have left just a line to tell him to cancel his
arrangements.... But what could he expect from such a tricksy sprite
of a girl? Only twenty-seven hours before he had seen her,
flagrantly tardy, nonchalantly unrepentant, first mock and then
annihilate the worthy and earnest young Englishman who had
endeavored to correct her ways ... He had known then the volatile
stuff that she was made of--and had succumbed to it!

But he _had_ succumbed. On that point he was most disastrously
certain. The memory of the young girl possessed him. Her beauty
haunted him, that spring-like beauty with its enchanting youth and
gaiety. And the spirit that animated that beauty, that young,
blithe, innocently audacious spirit which looked out on the world
with such sunnily trustful eyes, drew him with a golden cord.

       *       *       *       *       *

He smoked many a pipe over it that night, his feet on the open
window ledge, his eyes on the far-spreading flat roofs, the distant
domes and minarets darkly silhouetted against the sky of softest,
deepest blue. The stars were silver bright. They spangled the heaven
with the radiance they never give to northern skies; they gleamed
like bright, wild creatures on their unearthly revels.... It would
be glorious camping in the desert on a night like this ... Heaven be
praised, he had not bought that berth ... Alexandria ... the
Maynards ... the desert ...

He knocked out the ashes from his last pipe and rose briskly. His
decision was made, but its success was on the knees of the great god
Luck.




CHAPTER VII

BILLY HAS HIS DOUBTS


The encounter in the bazaars that Thursday afternoon brought one
more result to young Hill besides the bruise upon his chin and the
privilege of bowing to Lady Claire and her vigilant chaperon, and
the presence of Lady Claire's little handkerchief in his coat
pocket.

It brought a young German, scrupulously sober, soberly apologetic,
in formal state to Billy's hotel upon Friday morning, whose card
announced him to be Frederick von Deigen and whose speech proclaimed
him to be utterly aghast at his own untoward behavior.

"I was not myself," he owned, with a sigh and a melancholy twist of
his upstanding mustaches. "I had been lunching alone--and it is bad
to lunch alone when one has a sadness. One drinks--to forget.... But
you are too young to understand." He waved his hand in compliment to
Billy's youth, then continued, with increasing energy, "But when I
find what _dummheit_ I have done--how I have so rudely addressed the
young Fräulein with you, and have used my fists upon you, even to
the point of hurling you upon the street--I have no words for my
shame."

"Oh, it wasn't exactly a hurl," Billy easily amended. "There was a
banana peel where my heel happened to be--and I wasn't half
scrapping. I could see you weren't yourself."

"Indeed no! Would I," he struck himself gloomily upon the breast,
"would I intrude upon a young Fräulein, and attack her protector? It
was that bottle--that last bottle.... I knew--at the time.... I
offer you my apology. I can do no more--unless you would have
satisfaction--no?"

"I guess I had all the satisfaction that was coming to me
yesterday," said Billy. "You've got a fist like a professional. But
there's no harm done.... Only you want to get over taking that last
bottle and offering presents to young ladies," he concluded, with an
accent of youthful severity.

The German nodded a depressed head. His melancholy, bloodshot eyes
fixed themselves sadly upon Billy. "Ach, it is so," he assented
meekly, "but when one has a sadness--" He sighed.

"Yes, of course, that's tough," agreed Billy sympathetically. "I
hate a sadness."

"Perhaps you have known--?" The other's eyes lifted toward him, then
dropped dispiritedly. "But, no, you are too young. But I--Ach!" He
added in his own tongue a line of which Billy caught _geliebt_ and
_gelebt_, and so nodded understandingly.

"That geliebing business is bad stuff," he returned, and again the
other tugged at his mustaches with a nervous hand and shook his big
blond head.

"She was to have met me here," he said abruptly. "She wrote--I was
to come quick--and then she comes not. That is woman, the _ewige
weibliche_." He scowled. "But, Gott, how enchantment was in her!"

Billy heard himself sigh in unison. The phrase suggested Arlee. And
the situation was not dissimilar. He felt a positive sympathy for
the big blond fellow in his pronounced clothes and glossy boots and
careful boutonnière.... He smiled in friendly fashion.

"She'll come along yet," he prophesied, "and if she doesn't, just
you go out after her. I wouldn't take too many chances in the
waiting game."

The German shook his head. His blue eyes swam with sentimental
moisture. "You do not understand," he said. "She went with
another--I must wait for her to come away. I have no address--so?"

"Well, that--that's different," stammered the young American. His
sympathy became cynical. Fishy business--but even a fishy business
has its human side. So presently he found himself gazing
interestedly upon the photograph the German displayed in the back of
his watch--the photograph of a decolleté young woman with
provocative dark eyes and parted lips and pearl-like teeth, and he
shook the caller's hand most heartily in parting, and prophesied,
with fine assurance, the successful end of this fishy romance.

"You have a heart, my friend," said the German solemnly, and lifting
hat and stick and lemon-colored gloves from the table, he bowed
profoundly in farewell.

"And to the Fräulein--you will give my so deep apology?" he added
earnestly, and Billy assured him that he would. And he found
himself, for all his pre-occupation with the vision of Arlee's
spring-like beauty, by no means displeased at the errand. A man must
have something to do while he is waiting--if he is to avoid last
bottles! He would seek her out that very afternoon.

       *       *       *       *       *

But by afternoon he was tearing upstairs and downstairs through the
hotel after a very different quarry, which at last he ran to earth
at a tiny table behind a palm on the veranda. The quarry was further
protected by an enveloping newspaper, but Billy did not stand on
ceremony.

"I want to talk to you," said he.

Falconer looked up. He recognized Billy perfectly, though his gaze
gave no admission of that. This tall young fellow with the deep-set
gray eyes and the rugged chin and the straight black hair he first
remembered seeing dancing that Wednesday evening with Arlee--after
their own disastrous tea and its estrangement. Arlee had appeared on
mystifyingly good terms with him, though he was positive from his
own observations, and had corroboration from the Evershams, that she
had never spoken to him until five minutes before. Then the fellow
had fairly grilled the Evershams about the girl's whereabouts last
night. And he had learned that the previous afternoon he had managed
to take Claire's protection upon himself in the bazaars, actually
convincing her that she ought to feel indebted to him, and had
driven back with them.... An unabashed intruder, that fellow! He
ought to have a lesson.

His air of unwelcome deepened, if possible, as Billy helped himself
to a chair, drew it confidentially close to him and cast a careful
glance about the veranda.

"I don't want anyone to hear this," he explained.

Falconer smiled cynically. He had met confidential young Americans
before. There was nothing they could sell _him_.

"It's about Miss Beecher." Billy looked uncomfortable. He hesitated,
blushed boyishly through his tan, and blurted, "There's something
mighty queer about that departure of hers yesterday."

"Ah!"

"I don't feel right about it.... It's deuced queer. She isn't in
Alexandria."

"Ah!"

"If you say 'Ah' again, I hope you choke," said Billy violently to
himself. Aloud he continued, "I wired to the Khedivial and to all
the other hotels--there are just a few--and she isn't registered
there, and the Maynards are not, either."

"Possibly staying with friends," said Falconer indifferently. He
regarded his paper.

"Very few Americans have friends in Alexandria. However, that might
be so. But no ship has arrived from the Continent for three days,
and it seems mighty odd, if they were there three days ago, for them
to have wired at the last minute and had her tear off like that."

"I do not pretend to account for your compatriots," said the
sandy-haired young man.

Billy looked at him a minute. "There's no use in your being
disagreeable," he remarked. "I didn't thrust myself upon you because
I was attracted to you, at all. But I thought you were a sensible,
masculine human being who was interested in Miss Beecher's
whereabouts."

"I beg your pardon," said the other young man. "I am--I mean I am
interested--if you think there is anything really wrong. But I do
not see your point."

"Well, now, see if you can see this. I wired the consul there and
some other fellow at the port, and they wired back that no people of
the name of Maynard have arrived on any of the boats for the past
two weeks--that was as far back as they looked up. Now that's
_queer_."

"He could be mistaken--or they could have bought some one else's
accommodations--and that would account for the hastiness of their
plans," Falconer argued.

"But what train did she go on?"

"What train? Why, the express for Alexandria."

"That left at eight-thirty. Now why in the world would she rush away
in the middle of the afternoon, sending a telegram from the station
and leaving her packing undone, for an eight-thirty train?"

"Why I--I really can't say. She may have had errands----"

"Where did she have her dinner? Did she dine with friends at some of
the hotels? What friends has she here?"

"I really can't say as to that, either. I wasn't aware that she had
any."

"And where did she send that telegram from? There isn't a copy of
any such telegram at the offices I've been to--at Cook's or the
station. It might have been written on a telegraph blank and sent up
by messenger with the money--but why not come herself, with all that
time on her hands? And nobody remembers selling her any ticket to
Alexandria--and you know anybody would remember selling anything to
a girl like that."

Falconer was silent.

"And nobody at Cook's paid out any money on her letter of credit--or
cashed any express checks for her. Where did that money come from
that was sent back to the hotel?"

"But what is the point of all this?"

"That's what I just particularly don't know.... But it needs looking
into."

Falconer favored him with a level scrutiny. "How long have you known
Miss Beecher?"

"I met her the night before last. That, however, doesn't enter into
the case."

"It would seem to me that it might."

"Between three days and three weeks," said Billy, remembering
something, "the difference is sometimes no greater than between
Tweedledum and Tweedledee." He smiled humorously at the other young
man, a frank, likeable smile that softened magically the bluntness
of his young mouth. "That's why I came to you. You are the only soul
I know to be interested in Miss Beecher's welfare. The Evershams are
off up the Nile--and they'd probably be helpless, anyway. Besides,
you know more about this blamed Egypt of yours than I do.... Have
you any idea where she went yesterday afternoon?"

"Not at all."

"Neither have the Evershams. They were surprised when I asked them
about it this morning. They didn't know she was going. Now she went
somewhere in a limousine----"

"Probably to the station."

"American girls don't go to stations in floating white clothes and
hats all pink roses. I particularly remember the pink rose," said
Billy gloomily. "No, if she had been going to the station she would
have had on a little blue or gray suit, very up and down, and a
little minute of a hat with just one perky feather. And she'd have a
bag of sorts with her--no girl would rush away to Alexandria without
a bag."

"She could have sent it ahead of her or returned and dressed later
for the station."

"Why the mischief did I tramp off to those bazaars?" said the young
American. "But, see here--weren't you around the hotel after that
yesterday--at tea time?"

"Er--yes--I----"

"And weren't you rather looking out for Miss Beecher? Wouldn't you
have noticed if she had been coming or going?"

Falconer stroked his small mustache and shot a look at Billy out of
the corners of his eyes which expressed his distinct annoyance at
these intrusive demands.

"I don't remember to have met you," said he slowly.

"You haven't. I know your name, but you don't know mine. I am
William B. Hill."

"Ah--Behill."

"No--_B._ Hill. The B is an initial."

"Of what?" said the other casually, and Billy's cheeks grew suddenly
warm.

"Of my middle name," said he, with steady composure. "If we are to
do any team-work you will have to let it go at the William and the
Hill."

"What team-work do you suggest?"

"Find out where she went yesterday. Find out where she is now. What
worries me," he burst out, with ungovernable uneasiness, yet with a
hint of humor at his own extravagant imaginings, "is her talking to
that Turk fellow yesterday--that Captain Kerissen, I think she
called him. She had told me the night before that he was going to
get her some ball tickets or other, and I didn't think anything of
it, but yesterday I thought he had his nerve to come and call upon
her. You see, I passed through the hall and saw them talking. I went
out to the veranda and after he had gone I came in again, but she
was nowhere in sight. Then I went back to the veranda, and in a few
moments she came out, in white with a rose on her hat, and went off
in a car that was ready. Of course Kerissen wasn't in the car, and I
haven't any proof of his connection with the thing, but he might
easily have induced her to look at some mosque or other off the
'beaten track'----"

"But she returned, for later she sent that telegram from the
station," Falconer argued.

Billy was silent. Then he burst out, "But all the same there is a
mystery to this thing.... She--she's too confoundedly young and
pretty to run around alone in this painted jade of a city."

"This city has law and order--much more of them than there are in
your national hotbeds of robbery and murder."

"H'm--well, I don't hold any brief for Chicago--I suppose Chicago is
the target--so I won't defend that. But I've heard stories."

"Queer ones, I should say."

"_Devilish_ queer ones!... How about that young Monkton or Monkhouse
who dropped out of things last winter?"

Falconer looked annoyed. "Oh, there are rumors----"

"Yes, rumors that he flirted with a Turkish lady--that he was on
horseback just outside her carriage during the jam at the
Kasr-el-Nil bridge, and they looked and smiled and afterwards met in
a shop. And rumors that she gave him a _rendezvous_ at her home and
that he told another man about it at the club, who warned him
sharply, and he only laughed.... But it's no rumor that he
disappeared. He's gone, all right, and nobody knows where he went,
and nobody seems to want to know. Officially they said he was
drowned out swimming--or lost in a sandstorm riding in the
desert--or spiked on top of an obelisk or something equally
reasonable--but, privately, people say other things.... No
international law intrudes into the Turkish woman question."

"What of it?" Falconer looked stubborn. "I daresay the fellow
received his deserts.... But the case hardly applies--what?"

"Well--it makes one feel that anything can happen here--that the
city is quicksand where a chance step would engulf one." Billy
stared frowningly out on the vivid street ahead of him. A pretty
English bride and her soldier husband were out exercising their
dogs. Two ladies in a victoria were advertising their toilettes. A
blond baby toddled past with his black nurse. It was all very
peaceful and charming. It did not look like quicksand.... Into the
picture came a one-eyed man with a stuffed crocodile on his head,
stalking slowly along, scanning the veranda with his single,
penetrating eye, calling his wares in harsh gutturals, and with him
came suddenly the sense of that strange background before which all
this bright tourist life was played, that dark watching, secret
East, curious and incalculable.

Falconer folded his paper with a sharp crackle that recalled young
Hill's wandering thought. "That's all very well, but it doesn't
apply," he observed, with conviction.

"Then where is she?" Billy was bluntly belligerent.

The other put his paper in his pocket. "In Alexandria, to be sure,
and not at all pleased, either, to have you bring her name into such
questioning." He looked squarely at Billy as he said that, and the
eyes of the two young man met and exchanged a secret challenge of
hostility.

Billy rose. "Oh, all right," he returned. "I daresay I am as much a
fool as you take me for.... She may be all right. But if not--I
thought I'd give you a chance to take a hand in it."

"The sporting chance," said Falconer, with an appreciable smile.
"I'm much obliged--but I don't at all share your misgivings.... And
what in the world do you propose to do about it?"

For a minute Billy's gaze blankly interrogated the sunlit distances.
His eyes were fixed, but empty; his forehead knitted in an uncertain
frown. Then quite suddenly he turned and flashed at Falconer a look
of odd and unforeseen decision.

"I'm going to buy a crocodile," he imparted, with a wide, boyish
grin. "I'm going to buy a crocodile of a one-eyed man."

Stolidly Falconer eyed his departing back. Stolidly, definitely,
comprehensively, he pronounced judgment. "Mad," said he. "Mad as the
March Hare."




CHAPTER VIII

THE MIDNIGHT VISITOR


That stealthy touch brought Arlee half upright, shot with ghastly
alarms. Her heart stopped beating; it stood still in the cold clutch
of terror. The breath seemed to have left her body.

Once more she felt the hands gropingly upon her. It came from the
back side of her bed, reaching apparently from the very wall. And
then she heard a voice whispering, "Be still--I do not hurt you. Be
still."

It was a woman's voice, soft, sibilant, hushed, and the frozen grip
of fear was broken. She was trembling now uncontrollably.

"Who is there?"

"S-sh!" came the warning response, and then, her eyes staring into
the shadowy recess, she saw the curtains at the back side of the bed
were parting as a figure appeared between them.

"Give me a box, a book--somethings to put here in this lock,"
commanded the voice peremptorily, and in a daze Arlee found herself
extending a magazine across the bed toward the half-seen figure, who
turned and busied herself about the curtains a moment, then came
straight across the bed into the room beside Arlee.

"Now you see who I am," said the astonishing intruder calmly.

Mutely Arlee shook her head, seeing only a figure about her own
height clad in a dark negligée. Dumfounded she stood watching while
her visitor deliberately lighted a candle.

"So--that is better," she observed, and in the light of the tiny
taper between them the two stood facing each other.

Arlee saw a girl some years older than herself, a small, plump,
rounded creature, with a flaunting and insouciant prettiness. Her
eyes were dark and bright, her babyish lips were full and scarlet,
her nose was whimsically uptilted. Dark hair curled closely to the
vivid face and fell in ringlets over the white neck.

"You don't know me?" she said in astonishment at Arlee's eyes of
wonder. "He has not told you?" Incredulity, impertinent and mocking,
darted out of the dark eyes. "What you think then--you what got my
room?"

"Your room?" Arlee echoed faintly. She flung a quivering hand toward
the bed. "How did you get in here? I locked the door----"

"You see how I came--I came by the panel," She waited a moment,
watching the wide blue eyes before her, the parted lips, the white
cheeks in which the blood was slowly stealing back, and incredulity
gave way to astonished acceptance. "You don't know that, either?
That is very funny."

"Did you lock it?" was Arlee's next breathless question. "What was
that you said about putting in a magazine? Did you leave it open?"

The other girl reached quickly and caught her arm, as Arlee turned
toward the bed. "No, no, if it goes shut we cannot open it inside,"
she warned. "It does not open this side unless you have the key. It
opens from without. But he will not come in now--he is at the
Khedive's palace. We are all right."

"But I want to get away," cried Arlee. She turned upon this other
girl great eyes of pitiful entreaty, eyes where the dark shadows
about them lay like cruel bruises on the white flesh. "I must get
away at once. Won't you help me?"

"Help you? I would help myself, if I could. But there is no way out.
It is no use." The unknown girl spoke with a bitterness that brought
conviction. Piteously the flare of hope and spirit wilted.

"You are sure?" she questioned faintly. "There is no way out?"

"No way, no way!" The other shook her head impatiently. "Do I not
know? Let us talk of that again. Now I came to see you, to see what
pretty face had sent me packing!" She laughed, but there was
ugliness in the laughter, and catching up the candle she held it
before Arlee, her face impudently close, her eyes black darts of
curiosity.

"Well you are pretty enough," she said coolly. "Hamdi has always the
good taste. But do you think you will keep my room from me--h'm?"

"I do not want your room," said Arlee with passionate intensity.
"I do not want to stay here. I want only to go away. Oh, there must
be a way. Please help me--please." She choked and broke down, the
tears hot in her eyes.

  [Illustration: "'I do not want to stay here'"]

The other girl abruptly drew her down on the couch and settled
herself beside her among the cushions. "Here--be comfortable--let us
be comfortable and talk," she said. "Do not cry so--What, you are so
soon sorry? You want to be off?"

Desperately Arlee steadied her shaking voice. "I must go at once."

"You got enough so soon?"

"Enough!" was the quivering echo.

"What you come for then?"

"Come for? I did not know what I was coming into. I thought--but
tell me," she broke off to demand, "tell me about the plague. Was
there any quarantine at all? How soon was it over? What is really
happening?"

"Quar--quar--what you mean?"

"The plague? Has there been a plague here? Have people had to stay
in the palace on account of it?"

"Oh--h!" The indrawn breath was eloquent of enlightenment. "Is that
somethings he said to you?"

"Yes, yes. Isn't it true? Wasn't there any plague?"

With eyes of dreadful apprehension she saw the other shake her head
in vigorous denial. "No plague," she said decisively. "My maid--she
know everything. No sickness here."

"Then it was all a lie." Arlee's eyes fixed themselves on the
dancing candle flame, swaying in the soft night air. She tried to
think very coolly and collectedly, but her brain felt numb and
fogged and heavy. The sight of that tortured candle flame hypnotized
her. Faintly she whispered, "Then it was all--an excuse," and, at
that, sharp terror, like a knife, cleaved her numbness. She turned
furiously to her visitor.

"But he would not dare make it all up!"

She saw the callousness of the shrug. "Why not--he is the master
here!" Her own heart echoed fearfully the words. She stammered,
"But--but I wrote--I had a letter--there must----"

"What in all the world are you saying?" demanded the other. "What is
this story?" and as Arlee began the quick, whispered narration she
listened intently, her little dark head on one side, nodding wisely
at intervals.

"So--you came to have tea," she repeated at the close, in her
quaintly inflected, foreign-sounding English. "And you stay because
of the plague? So?"

"But I wrote--I wrote to my friends and----"

"And gave him the letters!"

"But I had a letter from my friends--or a telegram rather." Arlee
knitted her brows in furious thought. "And it sounded like her."

"Does he know her, that friend?" questioned the other and at Arlee's
nod, "Then he could write it himself--that is easy on telegraph
paper. He is so clever, that devil, Hamdi."

"But my friends knew where I was going"--slowly the mind turned back
to trace the blind, careless steps of that afternoon. "At least he
said he'd leave a note--Oh, what a fool I was!" she broke off to
gasp, seeing how that forethought of his, that far-sighted remark,
had prevented her from leaving a note of her own. And she remembered
now, with flashing clearness, that upon her arrival he had
carelessly inquired if she, too, had left a note of explanation. How
lightly she had told him no! And what unguessed springs of action
came perhaps from that single word! For so cleverly had the trap
been swiftly prepared that if anything had gone wrong, if anyone had
become aware of her intentions, it could have passed off as a visit
and she would have returned to her hotel prattling joyously of her
wonderful glimpse into the seclusion of Turkish aristocracy!

"But the soldier with the bayonet," she said aloud. "There was one
on the stairs."

"A servant."

"Oh, if I had passed him!"

"You could not--he would run you through on a nod from Hamdi. They
watch that stairs always--day and night."

Day and night--and she was alone here, in this grim palace, alone
and helpless and forsaken.... What were her friends thinking about
her? Where did they think she was? Her thoughts beat desperately
upon that problem, trying to find there some ray of hope, some
promise that there were clues which would lead them to her, but she
found nothing there but deeper mystery and fearful surmise. He was
clever enough to cover his traces. No one had known of his
connection with her departure.... Perhaps he had sent them some
false and misleading message like the one he had sent her.... What
were they thinking? What did they believe? This was Friday night,
and she had been gone since Thursday afternoon.

In that moment she saw with merciless clarity the bitter straits
that she was in.

"Oh, he is a devil!" her companion was reaffirming with an angry
little half-whisper sibilant with fury. "Look how he treat me--me,
Fritzi Baroff! You do not know me? You do not know that name? In
Vienna it is not so unknown--Oh, God, I was so happy in Vienna!" She
stopped, her breast heaving, with the flare of emotion, then went on
quickly, with suppressed vehemence, "I was a singer--in the light
opera. I dance, too, and I was arriving. Only this year I was to
have a fine rôle--and it all went, zut, it all went for that man! I
was one fool about him, and his dark eyes and his strange ways.... I
thought I had a prince. And he worship me then, too--he follow me,
he give me big diamonds.... So he take me here--it was to be the
vacation!"

She gave a strangling little laugh. Arlee was listening with a
painful intensity. She was living, she thought, in an Arabian
nights.

"I stay at the hotel first till he make this like a private
apartment for me," went on the little dancer, "and when I come here
he do everything for me. I have luxury, yes, jewels and dresses and
a fine new car. Then, by and by, I grow tired. It was always the
same and he was at the palace, much. And he would not let me make
acquaintance. We quarrel, but still I have a fancy for him, and
then, you understand, money is not always so easy to find. Life can
be hard. But I get more restless, I want to go back on the stage and
I, well, I write some letters that he finds out. _Bang_, goes the
door upon me! He laugh like a fiend. He say that I am to be a little
Turkish lady to the end of my life. Oh, God, he shut me up like a
prisoner in this place, and I can do nothing--nothing--nothing!"

She beat out angry emphasis on the palm of one hand with a clenched
little fist. "I go nearly mad. I lose my head. He laugh--he is like
that. He is a devil when he turns against you, and, you understand,
he had somethings new to play with now.... Sometimes he seem to love
me as before, and then I would grow soft and coax that he take me to
Europe some day, and then when I think he mean it--Oh, how he
laugh!" She drew in her breath sharply. "Sometimes I think he will
take me again--sometime--but I cannot tell. And the days never end.
They are terrible. My youth is going, going. And my youth is all I
have."

She looked at Arlee with eyes where her terror was visible, and all
the lines of her pretty, common little face were changed and
sharpened, and her babyish lips dragged down strangely at the
corners.

A surge of pity went through Arlee Beecher. "Oh, you will escape,"
she heard herself saying eagerly. "And I will escape--or--or----"

"Or?"

"Or I will kill myself," she whispered quiveringly.

The little Viennese stared hard at her, and a sudden crinkle of
amusement darted across the bright shallows of her eyes. "Come,
love is not so bad," she said, "and Hamdi can be charming." Then as
she saw a shudder run through the young girl before her, "Oh, if you
do not fancy him!" she cried airily, yet with a keen look.

But Arlee's two hands sought and covered up the scarlet shame in her
face. She did not cry; she felt that every tear in her was dried in
that bitter flame. Her whole body seemed on fire, burning with fury
and revulsion and that awful sense of humiliation.

The other stirred restively, "Come, do not cry--I hate people to
cry. It makes everything so worse. And do not talk of killing. It is
not so easy anyway, that killing. Do I not think I will die and end
all when my rage is hot--but how? How? I cannot beat my head out
against the wall like a Russian. I cannot stick a penknife in my
throat or eat glass. To do that one must be a monster of courage.
And I have no poison to eat, no gas to turn on.... Then the mood
goes and the day is bright and I look in the glass and say, 'Die?
Die for you? Kill all this beautiful young thing that has such joy
to dance and sing? Never! Some day I will be out of this and laugh
at the memory of such blackness.' And so I practice my voice and my
steps--and I wait my chance. When you came, yesterday, first I was
furious to be pushed out, then I think it is the chance, maybe. I
think you would be glad to help me to get out and not to stay to
make you jealous. But if you are also in the trap----" Her voice
fell dispiritedly. She drew a long, weary breath.

"But I shall not stay in the trap." Arlee spoke with desperate
resolve, her eyes on the sputtering candle, her palms against her
burning cheeks, her finger tips pressed into her throbbing temples.
"I shall not let him make me afraid like this. He must know he will
be found out--he cannot play like this with an American girl! I
shall face him to-morrow. I shall demand my freedom. I shall tell
him that I did tell people at the hotel--that he will be discovered.
I will make _him_ afraid!"

"You cannot. He watches what happens on the outside--he knows."

After a pause, "Oh, why did I come!" said Arlee in choking
bitterness.

The little dancer turned, and, sitting there cross-legged on the
couch like a squat little idol, her chin sunk in her palm, her dark
eyes staring unwinkingly at Arlee, gave the girl a long, strange
scrutiny.

"You do not like him?" she said.

"I hate him!"

"But you came to tea?"

"To meet his sister. To see the palace."

"His sister? Did he show you one?"

"Yes--a woman with red hair. A Turkish woman. She spoke French to
me."

"Ah--that would be Seniha!"

"Seniha? I don't know. She played the piano. Has he more than one
sister?"

But as she put the question a sudden flash of intuition forestalled
the dancer's mocking cry of "Sister!" And as Fritzi hurried on, "He
has no sister--not here, anyway," Arlee's thoughts ran back to the
beginning of that very evening which seemed so long ago when she had
plunged wildly into those unknown rooms, and saw again that
painted, jeweled woman with her outstretched arms.

"She is his wife," the Viennese was saying.

"I--I did not know that he was married."

"Oh, Turkish marriages." The other shrugged, with a contempt a
trifle droll in one who had dispensed with every ceremony. "She was
his second. The first was a little girl, he said. The match was made
for him. She is dead. This Seniha was her cousin, a cousin who was
divorced and she lived with the wife. And our pretty Hamdi made love
to her, and she was mad about him and so, presently, it happens that
he must marry her, for it would be terrible to have disgrace upon
the wife's family. Besides the first wife had no children. So he
married her. But _she_ had no children. It was all one fairy story."
Fritzi laughed under her breath in great enjoyment. "So Hamdi was
cheated and he has been a devil to her. The first little wife dies
and he shut the second up here, teasing her sometimes, sometimes
making love when he is dull, but forcing her to his will for fear he
will divorce her.... How she must have hated you, when she had to
play that sister. Except that she was glad that _I_ was being put
aside," the dancer added with quick spite. "I think she would put
poison in my meat if she did not fear Hamdi so.... And always she
hopes that he will come back to her. I have seen her waiting, night
after night----"

And Arlee thought of the jewels and the silks ... and the long,
long, silent hours.... Slowly she put out her hand and snuffed out
the smoking wick, then raised her eyes to where the painted bars
stretched black across the starry square of sky. "Won't _she_
help?" she asked.

"Not she! Hamdi would find her out.... Not through her can you get
word to your friends. For you have friends here? And they will help
you? And then you will help me?"

"Oh, yes, if I can get help," promised Arlee. "But I am afraid my
friends have gone up the Nile--and there are just--just one or two
left in Cairo that would help. And I must get word to them _at
once_. What is the best way? Couldn't I push a note through the
windows on the street? Someone might see that!"

"Yes, the doorkeeper. No, that is not safe.... If only that girl
were sure----"

"Mariayah?" cried Arlee.

"No, the other--the little one with the wart over her eye. Have you
seen her? Well, watch for her, then. She has an itching palm--she
may help. But only in little things, of course, for she is afraid.
And I have no money left and she is afraid to take a jewel."

"I have almost no money," said Arlee blankly. "Only a letter of
credit----"

"A letter of nothing here! But promise her your friends will give
much."

"Would she mail a letter?"

"Have you stamps? No? She is so ignorant that is an obstacle. And
the post is distant and she dare not go far. But sometimes the baker
sends a little boy, and if you had money to give she might get a
note to him to carry--though, maybe, she burns the note and keeps
the money," the Viennese ended pessimistically.

"But I must get help _at once_," Arlee iterated passionately.
Before----"

"Before?" the other repeated curiously, "He makes love to you--h'm?"

"He--is beginning."

"Only beginning?"

"Only--beginning." Arlee felt the girl's strange, hard scrutiny
through the dark. Then she heard her draw a quick breath as if her
eyes on Arlee's flower-like face had convinced her of something
against all her sorry little reason.

"Well, that is good then," she said. "Try to keep him off. What does
he promise you?"

"Promise me? He does not promise anything."

"But he must say something--what is between you--what?" demanded the
other impatiently.

Briefly, her shamed cheeks grateful for the shadows, Arlee told of
that walk in the garden, of the flowers and the letter, the scene
after dinner. And the other girl's eyes grew wider and wider, and
then finally she burst into a smothered little laugh.

"Oh, he is mad, that Hamdi!" she whispered. "He is a monster of
vanity--'conquest of the spirit'--h'm, I comprehend. That young man
has a pride beyond all sense. You dazzle him--he is in love again
like a boy. And he must dazzle you. His pride demands a victory not
of force alone.... Some men are like that.... Well, that is your
chance!"

"My chance?"

"Play with his vanity--fight his force with that!" said this strange
initiator into terrible secrets. "He will believe anything of his
fascinations--I know him. And if he is so mad for you that he dares
all this trouble to have you here, then he is so mad that you can
fool him and make him hold back in hopes to gain more from you. Make
him think you are coming, as he wishes, heart and body, but still
you would wait a little. So you gain time.... Oh, you must be
careful! If he loses hope, if you anger him, why the game is over.
But if you are careful you can gain a few days----"

"A few days," said Arlee in a tense little voice.

"Well, that is something--since you hate him so!"

"Yes, that is something." Arlee drew a shivering breath, her head
drooping, her lashes on her cheeks. Then suddenly, amazingly, her
chin came pluckily up, her soft lips set with desperate decision,
her eyes turned on her counselor a look of flashing spirit. She was
like some young wild thing at bay, harried, defiant, tensely
defensive. Something of the pathos of her innocent presence there,
in that evil palace, utterly alone, hopelessly defiant, penetrated
for an instant the callous acceptances of the little dancer and her
eyes softened with facile sympathy, but the impression dulled, and
she only nodded her head encouragingly.

"Good! That is the way! Women can always act!" she murmured,
slipping off the divan and drawing her fluttering robes about her.
"But it is very late and I must go--it is not safe to stay so."

"Where is your room? Could I get to you?"

"No--for you cannot open that panel on the inside--unless you can
steal the key from him as I could not! My room--for this present,
little one," and her eyes laughed suddenly in challenge, "is up on
the top--a little old room all alone. My doors are locked, but there
is a panel in my room, too, a panel at the top of tiny stairs, and
the lock on that panel is so old and rusty that a knife make it
open. So I pushed it open and came down the tiny stairs that end out
there in the passage way, and I opened your panel. Now I must steal
back, but I shall come again, and we must plan."

"But where does this secret passage go?" Arlee had followed over the
bed, and held aside the heavy draperies while the little Baroff was
pushing the panel softly and carefully open. Eagerly Arlee peered
out into the darkness beyond. "Where does it go?" she repeated.

"It runs above the hall of banquets and into the _selamlik_,"
whispered the Viennese. "It opens into Hamdi's rooms, he says, and I
know that a servant sleeps always at his door and another is at the
foot of the stairs. So it would be madness to try that way."

But Arlee stared thoughtfully into the secret place. "I am glad I
know," she said.

"Well, good-by, little one." The Viennese was standing outside now,
softly closing the door. For a moment her face remained in the
opening. "You will not tell Hamdi that I came--no?" she demanded
sharply, and then on Arlee's quick reassurance she nodded, whispered
good-by again, and drew back her little face.

The wall rolled into place and a gentle click told of the caught
lock. The curtains fell back over the wall. And Arlee was left
huddling there alone, feeling that it had all been a dream, but for
the heavy scent that lingered in the air and the wild fear beating
in her heart.




CHAPTER IX

A DESPERATE GAME


Very slowly the black night grayed down into a wan, spectral
morning, and slowly the gray morning paled into a dim
mother-of-pearl dawn. And then suddenly the mother-of-pearliness
brightened into a shimmering opal, and the ray of pale gold light
slanted through the barred window and the bright face of new day
peeped over the sill, staring out of countenance the lurking shadows
of the night.

And then Arlee's eyes closed, and the heart which had been beating
like a frightened rabbit's at every sound and shadow steadied into a
rhythm as regular as a clock. She slept like a tired baby; while the
light grew brighter and higher, and reached in over the shining
dressing table, over the white piano, to rest upon the oblivious
face upon the couch and to play with the bright, tangled hair.

The first knocking upon the door did not disturb that sleep, and it
was a long time before the knock was again sounded. Then Arlee heard
and sprang to her feet in a lightning rush of consciousness. It was
Mariayah again, and the water jars which already looked familiar to
her, and after the water jars appeared more roses and with the roses
a letter.

Those roses came, the letter explained, to droop their heads before
her loveliness, which put theirs to shame. They would greet her as
humbler sisters greet a fairer. For they were roses of a day, but
she was the Rose of Life. The capitals were Kerissen's own. And then
abruptly the letter demanded:

      Did I frighten you last night? Is it so strange to you
      that you have magic to make a man forget all the barriers
      of your convention? Do you not know you have an
      enchantment which distills in the blood and changes it to
      wine? You are the Rose of Life, the Rose of Desire, and
      no man can look upon you without longing. But you must
      not be angry at me for that, for I am your slave, and
      would strew roses always to soften the world for your
      little feet.... Fortune has made you my guest. Will you
      not smile upon me while Fortune smiles? Luncheon will be
      in the garden, for it is cool and fresh today.

The mask was slipping. Only a flimsy veil of sentiment now over his
rash will. Only a light pretense of her freedom, of his courtesy. He
was beginning to declare himself....

But she must not let him suspect that she knew. She must _not_.

Her spirit responded fiercely to this tense demand upon it. The
dread, the panic of the night was gone. The fear that had shaken her
was beaten down like a cowardly dog. Excitement burned in her blood.
Everything depended upon her coolness and her wit, upon a look,
perhaps, the turn of a phrase, the droop of an eye, and she was
passionately resolved that neither coolness nor wit should fail her,
nor words nor looks nor eyes betray the heart of her. She would play
her rôle with every breath she drew.

       *       *       *       *       *

She crossed the room at the luncheon summons in the nervous tensity
of mood that an actress might go to play a part in which her career
would live or die. Every half hour with Kerissen was now a duel,
every minute was a stroke to be parried, and she flung herself into
that duel with the desperate exhilaration of such daring. Her hands
were icy, and her cheeks were flaming with the excitement which
consumed her, but she revealed no other trace of it, and she
wondered to herself at the inscrutable fairness of the face which,
looked back at her from the glass.

None of the record of those frightened, sleepless hours was written
there, none of her furious pride, her fixed intensity. Only the soft
shadows under the blue eyes gave her face a look of added delicacy
for all the unnatural flare of brilliant color, and a faint
wistfulness in those eyes seemed to overlay the smiles she
practiced, like a cloud shadow on a brook. And never, never, in all
her glad, care-free days, had she been as distractingly pretty as
she was that moment. With an angry little pang she recognized it,
pinning on the lace hat with its enchanting rose, and then
desperately she resolved to employ it and added two of Kerissen's
pink roses to the costume.

She thought the scene was very like a stage, when she came out
through the narrow door which the old woman unlocked from a key she
carried on a girdle, and slowly descended the stone steps. Beneath
the wide-spreading lebbek a low table was laid for luncheon with two
wicker chairs beside it. The green of the fresh turf was as vivid as
stage grass; the lilies loomed unreally large and white; the
poinsettias flaunted like red paper flowers behind the vivid picture
that the Captain made in a dazzling buff and green uniform picked
out with gold. His bow was theatric, so was the deep look of
exaggerated admiration he bent upon her--it was strange to remember
that her danger was not theatric also. But that was deadly real, and
real, too, was the sudden surge of color into the young man's sallow
face.

"You are kind to my roses--if not to me," he said quickly, and held
out his hand for the brief little clasp she accorded.

"Your roses are dumb and have said nothing to make me cross," she
laughed lightly, and looked swiftly about her. "How lovely this is,"
she ran on, "and how charming to feel a breeze. That room is rather
warm and close.... Is you sister still too ill to come?"

And scarcely waiting for the assent which he began to frame with his
searching eyes upon her, she added, "I am afraid I made her angry
last night by intruding upon her. But I heard her voice and ran back
to her room to ask after her. She wouldn't let me stay at all."

It was droll how natural her voice sounded, she thought. His eyes
held their fixed scrutiny in an instant, then dropped carelessly
away, as he drew forward the wicker chairs. "She is a _nerveuse_,
you understand," he said with an air of indolent resignation, "and
one can do nothing for that sort of thing. A crisis comes--one must
wait for it to pass.... She regrets that condition.... And she
wished me to present her regrets to you," he added suavely, "for
that reception of you last night. She was ill and did not expect
you--and she did not wish you to see her in that condition."

"I should not have gone," acknowledged Arlee, "but, as I said, I
heard voices from the ante-room and thought I would like to see
her.... That pretty little maid she gave me does not speak any
English, so I cannot send any messages."

"But you can write them."

"My French spelling is worse than my pronunciation!" She laughed
amusedly. "I wish you would find me an interpreter to put my polite
remarks into polite sounding phrases. I know I put things like a
First Reader!"

He smiled. "You do not put them like a First Reader to me. _We_ do
not need an interpreter.... Unless I need one to speak to you?"

"Oh, no, your English is wonderful!" She waited an instant, then
took a breathless plunge. "Have you any more news for me?" she
demanded, forcing the note of expectancy. It would be suspicious,
indeed, if she did not ask that. But what if he had decided to throw
the pretense aside----

"Not one word of news more," he said slowly.

She felt him watching her as she looked down on her plate. The
pretty little girl was passing a platter of pigeon: Arlee did not
speak until she had helped herself, then she said in a voice touched
faintly with chagrin, "Well, the English are not very gallant toward
ladies in misfortune, are they? I feel furiously snubbed.... Of
course Mrs. Eversham never was much of a writer, but they might send
over my letters from the hotel. The last mail ought to have brought
a lot from that big brother of mine."

"Ah, yes, that big, grown-up, married brother who is so satisfied
with all you do!"

She felt she had been unfortunate in her rash confidences.

"He won't be so pleased when he learns how I wasted a perfectly good
Nile ticket," she remarked. "And Big Brother is rather fierce when
he isn't pleased."

His eyes smiled, as if he understood and despised her suggestion.
"Cairo and your America are not so near," he observed negligently,
"that an incident here is a matter of immediate knowledge there."

She felt the danger of seeming to threaten him. "Oh, I'd 'fess up,"
she said lightly, playing with her food. "There--shoo--go away!" she
cried suddenly, with a militant gesture about her plate. "That's one
thing I hate about Egypt--the flies!"

"I hope that is the only thing you hate," said the young man
blandly.

"Isn't that enough? There are so many of them!"

He laughed with real amusement at her petulance. "Is there netting
enough in your room?" he inquired. "Would you like more for your
bed?"

"Oh, no, I'm all right, thank you. The flies are chiefly bothersome
at meals. This is certainly their paradise."

"But is there anything you would like--to make you happy here? I
will get it for you. Would you not like some books, some music, some
new clothes----"

"I don't wonder you ask! But really this white gown will last a
little longer--Cairo is so clean. No, thank you, there is nothing I
need bother you about--Oh, yes, there really is one book that I
would like--a Turkish or an Arabic dictionary. I have always meant
to learn a little of the language and this would seem the
opportunity."

In the pause in which he appeared to be consuming pigeon she could
feel him weighing her request, foreseeing its results.

"I shall be most happy to teach you," was what he said, but she knew
she would never have that dictionary. And so one plan of the morning
went flying to the winds. But she snatched at the next opening she
saw and plunged into interested questions about the Turkish
language, asking the words for such things as seemed spontaneously
to occur to her--wall, palace, table--numbers--days of the
week--repeating the pronunciation with the earnestness of a diligent
young pupil, until she felt that her memory had all it could hold.
And distrust, always ready now like a prompter in the box, suggested
most upsettingly that perhaps he was not giving the right words. She
resolved to experiment upon Mariayah.

He reverted, with increasing emphasis, upon his desire to make her
happy in the palace, to surround her with whatever she desired, and
swiftly she availed herself of this second opening.

"Yes, indeed, there is something that would make me happier, if you
don't mind, please," she added with a droll assumption of meekness.
"You don't know how horrid it is for me to be caged in one room and
not be out of doors, and I would love to come down into the garden
when I want to. Won't you give me a key to that door? That is, if it
is always locked."

"Generally it is not," he said readily, "but now with the soldiers
about it is safer. You see, the soldiers can approach the garden
through the open banquet hall"--and he nodded to the colonnade
behind them--"and though it is forbidden, one cannot foretell their
obedience."

To one who knew those soldiers were chimerical acquiescence was
maddening.

"But, dear me, can't you have some one in the banquet hall to shoo
the soldiers away?" Arlee argued persuasively. "Since the rest of
the household has the court, it seems awfully selfish not to let the
ladies have the garden for their airing."

"It may be managed," he assented. "It has always been done, for the
garden is for the ladies. Whenever you wish to be in the garden you
have but to send word, and the household will remain in the court,
as is, indeed, the custom."

"It would not be so terrible, you know, if a gardener or a
donkey-boy did see my face!" laughed Arlee. "Plenty of them have had
that pleasure before this."

She saw that the young man's face changed. Every clear-cut line of
it was sharp with repugnance. "You need not remind me of that," he
said with muffled fierceness, staring down at his plate.

"The danger line!" she thought while shaking her head at him, with
the tense semblance of an amused little smile.... "You aren't the
least bit English," she rebuked, "and I thought you were."

"Not in that.... And some day England will see her folly."

"America is seeing her folly now," thought Arlee with secret
bitterness. But when she raised her eyes they were gently
contemplative. She spoke musingly.

"In things like that you aren't at all what I thought you
were--about our social customs, I mean. Yet fundamentally, I think
you are."

"That I am what?"

"What I thought you were."

He waited, palpably waited, but Arlee continued to peel a tangerine
with absorption, and the question had to come from him. He put it
with an air of indolent amusement, yet she felt the intent interest
in leash.

"And what did you think I was like, _chère petite mademoiselle_?"

"Very handsome for one thing, Monsieur! You see, I owe you a
compliment for calling me such a pretty name as this!" With a
mischievous smile she touched the roses nodding in her girdle. "And
very autocratic for another, with a very bad temper. If you can't
get your way you would be shockingly disagreeable!"

"But I always get my way," he assured her lazily, his teeth showing
under his small, black mustache.

"I believe you do!" Ingenuous admiration, simple and sustained, was
in the look she gave him. Her hands were not half so icy now, nor
her nerves so tense. She felt strangely surer of herself; the actual
presence of the danger calmed her. She must make good with this, she
thought simply, in strenuous American.

"And yet," she went on thoughtfully, the pretty picture of
fascinated absorption in this most feminine topic--the dissection of
a young man--"yet, you are chivalrous. And I think that is the
quality we American girls admire most of all."

"The quality--of indulgence?" he questioned, with a half-railing
air.

"The quality--of gentleness."

"But is there not another quality which you American girls would
admire more than that gentleness--if you ever had the chance in your
lives to see it? The quality of dominance? The courage of the man
who dares what he desires, and who takes what he wills? Is not
that----"

"Ah, yes, we love strong men," Arlee flung into the speech that was
bearing him on like a tide, "but we don't think them strong unless
they are strong enough to fight themselves. They may take what they
will--but they mustn't crush it.... There is a gentleness in great
strength--I can't explain what I mean----"

"Ah, I see, I see." He smiled subtly. "I am not to crush you, little
Rose of Desire," he said softly.

She met the sly significance of his gaze with a look of frank,
unfaltering candor. "Of course not," she said stoutly. "When
you--you make me afraid of you, you make me like you less. You seem
less like the friend I knew on the boat."

"Ah, that boat!... You were my friend, then!" he added suddenly,
with a note of question sounding through the affirmation, and she
answered quickly, looking away with an air of petulant reproach.
"Why, you know I was, Captain Kerissen. And here in Cairo----"

"Yes, here in Cairo," he interrupted triumphantly, "in the face of
those eyes and tongues--I saw that red-headed dog of an Englishman
looking his anger at you! But you smiled on me before them
all--those fools, those tyrannic fools----"

"But you mustn't abuse my other friends! They were only--stupid!"

"Stupid as their blood brother, the ox!... But they are not in the
picture now--those other friends!" Disagreeably he laughed. "And you
do not grieve for them--no? The world has not touched you? There is
no one out there,"--he made a gesture over the guarding walls--"no
one who holds a fragment of your thought, of your heart in his
hands?"

She looked at him as if puzzled, then burst into a bubbling laugh.
"Why, of course not! I've just had a nice time with people. There
has never been a bit of sentiment about it!"

"Not on your side," he said meaningly, and because this was hitting
the truth smartly on the head she looked past him in some confusion.

"Oh--boys!" she said with a deprecating little laugh. "I've never
listened to them."

He leaned back in his chair, feeling for his cigarette case, and
the contentment of his look deepened. "You have been a child, asleep
to life," he murmured complacently. "I told you you were a
princess--let us say a sleeping princess waiting for the prince,
like that old fairy tale of the English." He was looking at his
cigarette as he tapped it on the arm of his chair, and slowly struck
a light, then, after the first breath, "But do you not hear his
footsteps in your sleep?" he added, and gave her a glance from the
corner of his eyes.

She looked up and then down; she stared out into the sun-flooded
garden and laughed softly. "Even princesses dream," she demurely
acknowledged, and thought the line and her fleet, meaning glance
went very well with this mad opera-bouffe which fate was forcing her
to play.

Kerissen seemed to think that went very well, too, for his flashing
teeth acknowledged his pleasure in her aptness; then his smile faded
and she felt him studying her over his cigarette, studying her
averted gaze, the bright color in her cheeks, the curves of her
lips, and he was puzzled and perturbed by the sweet, baffling beauty
of her. A wild elation began to swell his heart. His eyes glowed,
his blood burned with the triumph, not so much of his daring capture
of her, but of the flattering tribute that her pretty ways were
paying toward his personality alone. Wary as he was, cynical of
subterfuge, he did not penetrate her guard. His monstrous vanity
whispered eager flattery in his ears.

And still he continued to stare at her, finding her unbelievably
lovely. "My grandfather would call you an _houri_ from paradise,"
he told her, the warmth of admiration deepening in his eyes.

"And your grandfather's grandson knows that I am only an _houri_
from America!... But that _is_ paradise for _houris_!"

"And not for men, no!... Sometimes I have wished that those English
would restore in me that young belief in the heaven of the Prophet,"
he continued, smiling, "and now that wish is granted. It is here,
that paradise," and his smile, flashing about the lonely garden,
came to dwell again upon the girl before him.

She laughed. "But does one _houri_ make a paradise?" she bantered,
while the beating, hurrying heart of her went faster and faster till
she thought his ears would hear it. "We have a proverb--one swallow
does not make a summer."

"_Cela dépend_--that depends upon the _houri_.... When _you_ are
that one it is paradise indeed." He leaned toward her, speaking
softly, but with a voice that thrilled more and more in its own
eloquence.

She was the Rose of Desire, he reminded her, and beside her all
other flowers drooped in envy. She was as lovely as young Dawn to
the eyes of men. She was the ravishing embodiment of gaiety and
youth and delight. He quoted from the poets, not from his own
Oriental poets, but snatches from Campion and Wilde, vowing that

          "There was a garden in her face,
          Where roses and white lilies grow,"

and adding, with points of fire dancing in his heavy lidded eyes,

          "Her neck is like white melilote,
          Flushing for pleasure of the sun,"

and went on to add praise to praise and extravagance to
extravagance, till a sudden little imp of mirth caught Arlee by the
throat, hysterically choking her. "I shall never like praise or
poetry or--or men again," she thought, struggling between wild
laughter and hot disgust, while aloud she mocked, "Ah, you know too
much poetry, Captain Kerissen! I do not recognize myself at all! You
are laughing at me!"

"Laughing at you?... I am worshipping you," he said tensely, his
eyes on hers, and the fierce words shattered her light defenses to
confusion.

Silence gripped her. She tried to meet his look and smile in mock
reproof, but her eyes fled away affrighted, so full of desperate,
passionate things was the dark gaze they touched. She gripped her
cold little hands in her lap and looked out beyond the lebbek's
shade into the vivid garden. The hot sunshine lay orange on the
white-sanded paths; the shadows were purple and indigo. A little
lizard had come out from a crack in a stone and was sunning himself,
while one bright eye upon them, fixed, motionless, irridescent,
warned him of their least stir. She envied him the safety of his
crack.... She herself must meet this crisis--must turn this tide....

"It is--so soon," she faltered.

"Soon?" He had risen and was standing over her. "Soon? I was with
you on the boat--I walked by your side--I danced with you and held
you against my heart. And here in Cairo I walked and talked with
you.... And now for three days you have been under my roof, eating
at the table with me, alone within these walls, and you call it
soon! Truly, you are beyond belief! _Soon!_"

"But soon--for _me_!" she interrupted swiftly, and sprang to her
feet to face him with eyes and lips that smiled without a trace of
fear. Only her cheeks were no longer crimson but white as chalk.
"Too soon--for me to be sure--how _I_ feel! I hadn't realized--I
hadn't known--Oh, you mustn't hurry me! You mustn't hurry me!" She
broke off in a confusion he might well misconstrue, and moved
nervously away, her back to him.

He stood staring after her, a man not in two minds but in three and
four. Her broken words--her smiles--her emotion--these might well
arouse the most flattering surmise, and his vanity and his curiosity
were stirred to swift delight. He broke into a storm of words, of
protestations, of eager persuasion and honied flattery, drawing
nearer and nearer to her, while she slipped continually away from
him.

"You mustn't hurry me," she echoed defensively. "I am not like
you--you Southerners. I----"

"You are asleep--I have told you that you are that sleeping
princess," he broke in, and following after as she turned away from
him, he put a quick arm about her, and bending over her, tried to
turn her about toward him. "Do you know how that little sleeping
princess was awakened by her prince?" he murmured fatuously,
bending closer.

The hat saved her, that coquettish little hat with its jealously
guarding brim which bent obstinately lower and lower between them.
And in the instant of his indecision, while he waited for the
surrender his vanity expected before exerting the force that would
conquer brutally, she broke unexpectedly from his clasp and darted a
few steps away from him, whirling about to face him with her head
flung back, her eyes on fire, her lips parted in a breathless
excitement.

"Captain Kerissen," she cried, and there was a ring of gaiety in her
voice, "do I understand that you are proposing to me?"

Very formally he bowed, a bow that hid the astonishment and the
cynical humor which zigzagged across his handsome face. "I am doing
myself that honor," he most suavely returned, and eyed her with an
astonished curiosity that checked his passion.

"Really?... So soon?" she cried very childishly, and again he bowed.
But this time she caught his smile.

"Really so soon, little Arlee."

To his amazement she burst into prankish laughter.

"Oh, you _are_ romantic!" she gave back. "And if I can believe you
truly in earnest--last night I was furious at you," she went on
rapidly, interrupting the speech forming on his lips, "for I thought
you a dreadful flirt, just taking advantage of my being here, and
yet--and yet you _didn't_ seem that kind. You seemed a _gentleman_!
And now if you really mean--all you are saying--but you can't, you
can't! I know your words are running ahead of you!"

"My words--let my heart speak--I----"

"But I don't know whether I ought to listen or not!" she burst out,
and with great naïveté, "I'm afraid it would be very silly to let
myself care for you."

"Silly? An adorable silliness! Could you not be happy with me here
in this palace? You would be a princess, indeed, a queen of my
heart. I would put every luxury at your command." In mingled
eagerness and wariness he watched her, incredulous of her assenting
mood, but with a hope that lured him on to believe. And in his eyes,
dubious, desirous, calculating, watchful, she read the fluctuations
of his thought. If afterwards there should happen to be any trouble
about this affair, how wonderfully it would smooth things to have
the girl infatuated with him, to show that she had been a party to
the intrigue! And how spicily it sweetened the taste of success to
his lips!

He had caught her two hands in his, and clasping them tightly he
bent forward, trying to scan the changes in her hesitating look,
while his words poured forth in a stream of praise and promise. She
would live like a little princess. His love and his wealth were at
her feet. Other women were eager for him, but he was hers alone. She
would adore Egypt, the Egypt that he would reveal to her, and when
she wearied they would go to the Continent and live always as she
desired. Only she must be kind to him, be kind and sweet and lift
her eyes and tell him that she would make him happy. She must not
keep him waiting. He was not a man with whom one amused oneself.

"And I am not a girl whom one commands!" she gave back with a flash
of spirit and a childish toss of her head. "I like you, Monsieur, at
least I did like you before you hurt my fingers so horribly"--the
tight grasp on her hands relaxed and she drew them swiftly away,
rubbing them in mock ruefulness--"and I could like you better and
better--perhaps"--her blue eyes flashed a look into his--"if you
were _very_ nice and polite and give me time to catch my breath! You
are such a _hurrying_ sort of person!" Her whimsical little smile
enchanted him, even while he chafed at such delay.

"I am mad about you," he said in a low tone.

"And only me?" she laughed, her dimples showing.

So, teasing and luring, she held him off, and her heart beat
exultantly as she saw that she had given him the thought of marriage
for that of conquest, the dream of a perfect idyll for that of an
enforced submission.... It was a desperate play, but she played it
valiantly, and her fearfulness and the spell of her beauty sweetened
the rôle of beseeching suitor for him, and gave a glamour to this
pretty garden dalliance.... The memory of time came to him at last
with a start, and frowningly he stared at the watch he drew out to
consult.

"I must hurry away--to another part of the palace," he amended
swiftly, "where I have an engagement.... I shall not be at liberty
till to-night--rather late. I will send word to you, then----"

She shook her head at him. "To-morrow," she substituted gaily. "Let
us have luncheon to-morrow under the trees again like this.

"To-morrow is too far away----"

"No, it is just right for me. And if you really want to please
me----"

"But does it please you to make me miserable----?"

"You can't be very miserable when you have a luncheon engagement,"
she insisted. "_I'm_ not!"

He shrugged. "Till luncheon then--unless I should be back earlier
than I think." He gave her a quick look, but her face did not betray
awareness of the slip.

"Oh, of course, if you are at liberty sooner--And while you are busy
won't you manage things so I can stay out here awhile? I shall love
this garden, I know, when I am better friends with it," and after an
imperceptible pause he promised to send a maid back to keep watch
over her, and with a lingering pressure of hands and a look that
plainly said he was but briefly denying himself a more ardent
farewell, he hurried away through the banquet hall into the court.

She dared not run after to spy upon his departure. She could only
wait, hoping in every throbbing nerve that the maid would prove to
be the little one with the wart over her eye. And as she hoped she
feared, lest all her frail barrier of cards should be swept away by
a single breath.

If he should learn that the little dancer had visited her! If he
should discover that she was playing a game with him!




CHAPTER X

A MAID AND A MESSAGE


The March hare would have been a feeble comparison for Billy Hill's
madness if Robert Falconer could have seen him that Saturday
morning, that same Saturday on which Arlee was essaying her daring
rôle, for Billy Hill was sitting in the sun upon a camp stool, a
white helmet upon his head, an easel before him, and upon the easel
a square of blank canvas, and in Billy's left hand was a box of oils
and in his right a brush. And the camp stool upon which Billy was
stationed was planted directly before the small, high-arched door of
the Kerissen palace and in plain view of the larger door a few feet
to the right.

It had all followed upon acquaintance with the one-eyed man.

Taciturn in the beginning and suspicious of Billy's questionings,
that dark-skinned individual had at first betrayed abyssmal
ignorance of all save the virtues of stuffed crocodiles, but
convinced at last that this was no trap, but a genuine situation
from which he could profit, his greed overcame his native caution,
and through the aid of his jerky English and Billy's jagged Arabic
a certain measure of confidence was exchanged.

The one-eyed man then recollected that he had noticed a Turkish
officer and an American girl returning together to the hotel upon
that Wednesday afternoon. He had stared, because truly it was
amazing, even for American madness--and also the young girl was
beautiful. "A wild gazelle," was his word for her. The man was
Captain Kerissen. He was known to all the city--well known, he
was--in a certain way. It was not a good way for the ladies. Yes, he
had a motor car--a grand, gray car. (Billy remembered that the fatal
limousine had been gray.) It was well known that he had bought it
for a foreign woman whom he had brought from over-seas and installed
in the palace of his fathers. Yes, he knew well where that palace
was. His brother's wife's uncle was a eunuch there, but he was a
hard man who held his own counsel and that of his master.

Could a girl be shut up in that palace and the world be no wiser?
The one-eyed man stared scathingly at such ignorance. Why not? The
underworld might know, but native gossip never reached white ears.

What was the best way of finding out, then? The one-eyed man had no
hesitation about his answer.

A native must use his eyes and ears for the American. Through his
subtle skill and the American's money the discovery could be made.
The women servants would talk.

That was the way, Billy agreed, and quoted to the Arab his own
proverb, "A saint will weary of well-doing and a braggart of his
boasts, but a woman's tongue will never stop of itself," and the
one-eyed man had nodded, with an air of resigned understanding, and
quoted in answer, "There is nothing so great and nothing so small,
nothing so precious and nothing so foul, but that a woman will put
her tongue to it," and an understanding appeared to have been
reached.

The one-eyed man was to loiter about the palace, calling upon the
brother's wife's uncle if possible, and discover all that he could
without arousing suspicion. And Billy determined to do a little
loitering himself and quicken the one-eyed man's investigations and
keep watch of Kerissen's comings and goings, and a donkey boy was
hired by the one-eyed man to follow the Captain when he appeared in
the street and report the places to which he went.

It was all very ridiculous, of course, Billy cheerfully agreed with
himself, but by proving its own folly it would serve to allay that
extraordinarily nagging uneasiness of his. If he could just be
_sure_ that little Miss Beecher wasn't tucked out of sight somewhere
in the power of that barbaric scamp with his Continental veneer!

Meanwhile the Oriental methods to be employed in the finding out
appealed to the young American's humor and his rash love of
adventure. He was grinning as he sat there on that stool and stared
at the blank canvas before him. He had felt the rôle of artist would
be an excellent screen for his loitering, but he had done no
painting for a little matter of twenty years, not since he was a
tiny lad, flat upon his stomach in his home library, industriously
tinting the robes and beards of Bible characters and the backgrounds
of the Holy Land--this work of art being one of the few permitted
diversions of the family Sabbath. Now he reflected that the scenes
for his brush were decidedly similar.

With humorous interest he fell to work, scaling off the palace on
his left, blocking off the cemetery ahead, and trying to draw a palm
without emphasizing the thought of a feather duster. His engineering
training made him critical of his lines and outlines, but when it
came to the introduction of color he had the sensation of a
shipwrecked mariner afloat upon uncharted seas.

The color that his eyes perceived was not the color which his
stubborn memory persisted in reminding him was the actual hue of the
events, and the color that he produced upon canvas was no kin to any
of them. But it sufficed for an excuse, and he worked away,
whistling cheerily, warily observant of the dark and silent façade
of the old palace and alertly interested in the little groups his
occupation transiently attracted. But these little groups were all
of passers-by, shawl-venders, package-deliverers, beggars, veiled
desert women with children astride their shoulders, and the live
hens they were selling beneath their mantles, and these groups
dissolved and drew away from him without his being able to attract
any observation from the palace.

But at least, he thought doggedly, any girl behind those latticed
windows up there could see him in the street, and if Arlee were
there she would understand his presence and plan to get word down
to him. But he began to feel extraordinarily foolish.

At length his patience was rewarded. The small door opened and the
stalwart doorkeeper, in blue robes and yellow English shoes, marched
pompously out to him and ordered him to be off.

Haughtily Billy responded that this was permitted, and displayed a
self-prepared document, gorgeous with red seals, which made the man
scowl, mutter, and shake his head and retire surlily to his door,
and finding a black-veiled girl peering out of it at Billy, he
thrust her violently within. But Billy had caught her eyes and tried
to look all the significance into them of which he was capable.

Nothing, however, appeared to develop. The door remained closed,
save for brief admissions of bread and market stuff from little boys
on donkey-back or on a bicycle, all of whom were led willingly into
conservation, but none of whom had been into the palace, and though
Billy pressed as close to the door as possible when the boys
knocked, he was only rewarded with a glimpse of the tiled vestibule
and inner court.

To the irate doorkeeper he protested that he was yearning to paint a
palace court, but though he held up gold pieces, the man ordered him
away in fury and spoke menacingly of a stick for such fellows.

Now, however cool and fresh it was in the garden that Saturday, it
was distinctly hot in the dusty street, and by noon, as Billy sat in
the shade beside the palace door, eating the lunch he had brought
and drinking out of a thermos bottle, he reflected that for a man to
cook himself upon a camp stool, feigning to paint and observing an
uneventful door, was the height of Matteawan. He despised
himself--but he returned to the camp stool.

Nothing continued to happen.

Travelers were few. Occasionally a carriage passed; once a couple of
young Englishmen on polo ponies galloped by; once a poor native came
down the road, moving his harem--a donkey-cart load of black
shrouded women, with three half-naked children bouncing on a long
tailboard.

Several groups of veiled women on foot proceeded to the cemetery and
back again.

The one-eyed man sauntered by in vain.

In the heat of the afternoon the wide door suddenly opened and
Captain Kerissen himself appeared on his black horse. He spurred off
at a gallop, intending apparently to ride down the artist on the
way, but changed his mind at the last and dashed past, showering him
with dust from his horse's hoofs. The little donkey-boy, lolling
down the road, started to follow him, crying out for alms in the
name of Allah.

Billy stared up at the windows. Not a handkerchief there, not a
signal, not a note flung into the street! In great derision he
squirted half a tube of cerulean blue upon his canvas.

This, he reflected, was zero in detective work. It was also minus in
adventure.

But one never knows when events are upon the wing. Almost
immediately there came into the flatness of his bored existence a
victoria containing those two English ladies he had met--in the
unconventional way which characterized his meetings with ladies in
Cairo--two days before.

The recognition was mutual. The curiosity appeared upon their side.
To his horror he saw that they had stopped their carriage and were
descending.

"How interesting!" said Miss Falconer, with more cordiality than she
had shown on the previous occasion. "How very interesting! So you
are an artist--I do a little sketching myself, you know."

"You do happen in the most unexpected places," smiled Lady Claire.

The English girl looked very cool and sweet and fresh to the heated
painter. His impression of her as a nice girl and a pretty girl was
speedily reinforced, and he remembered that dark-haired girls with
gray-blue eyes under dusky lashes had been his favorite type not so
long ago ... before he had seen Arlee's fairy gold.

"We've just been driving through the old cemetery--such interesting
tombs," said the elder lady, and Lady Claire added, "I should think
you could get better views there than here."

By this time they had reached the easel and stood back of it in
observation.

Blue, intensely blue, and thickly blue was the sky that Billy had
lavished. Green and rigid were the palms. Purple was the palace.
Very black lay the shadows like planks across the orange road.

Miss Falconer looked as if she doubted her own eyes. Hurriedly she
unfolded her lorgnette.

"It--it's just blocked in," said Billy, speaking with a peculiar
diffidence.

"Quite so--quite so," murmured the lady, bending closer, as if
fascinated.

Lady Claire said nothing. Stealing a look at her, Billy saw that she
was looking it instead.

Miss Falconer tried another angle. The sight of that lorgnette had a
stiffening effect upon Billy B. Hill.

"You get it?" he said pleasantly. "You get the--ah--symphonic chord
I'm striking?"

"Chord?" said Miss Falconer. "Striking," she murmured in a peculiar
voice.

"It's all in thirds, you see," he continued.

"Thirds!" came the echo.

"Perhaps you're of the old school?" he observed.

"Really--I must be!" agreed the lady.

"Ah!" said Billy softly, commiseratingly. He cocked his head at an
angle opposite from the slant of the lorgnette and stared his own
amazing canvas out of countenance.

"Then, of course," he said, "this hardly conveys----"

"What are you?" she demanded. "Is this a--a school?"

"I?" He seemed surprised that there could be any doubt about it. "I
am a Post-Cubist."

Miss Falconer turned the lorgnette upon him. "Oh, really," she said
vaguely. "I fancy I've heard something of that--you're quite new and
radical, aren't you?"

"Oh, we're old," he said gently, "very, very old. We have returned
to Nature--but not the nature of mere academicians. We paint, not
the world of the camera, but the world of the brain. We paint, not
the thing you think you see, but the way you think you see it--its
vibrations of your inner mentality. To paint the apple ripening on
the bough one should reproduce the gentle swelling of the maturing
fruit in your perception.... Now, you see, I am not trying to
reproduce the precise carving of that door; I do not fix the wavings
of that palm. I give you the cerebellic----"

"Quite so," said Miss Falconer, dropping her lorgnette and giving
the canvas the fixity of her unobstructed gaze. "It's most
interesting," she said, a little faintly. "Are there many of you?"

"I don't know," said Billy. "We do not communicate with one another.
That always influences, you know, and it is better to work out
thought alone."

"I should think it would be." Something in her tone suggested that
the inviolated solitude of the asylum suggested itself to her as a
fitting spot. "Well, we won't interrupt you any longer. You've been
most interesting.... The sun is quite hot, isn't it?" and with one
long, lingering look at the picture, a look convinced against its
will, she went her way toward the victoria.

But Lady Claire stood still. Billy had fairly forgotten all about
her, and now as he turned suddenly from the clowning with her
chaperon, he found her gaze being transferred from his picture to
himself. It was a very steady gaze, calm-eyed and deliberate.

"I'm afraid you're making game of us!" she said, in her musical,
high-bred tones, her clear eyes disconcertingly upon him. "Aren't
you?" she gently demanded.

"That's not fair." Billy was uncomfortable and looked away in haste.
He felt a grin coming.

Perhaps he was a shade too late, for Lady Claire laughed suddenly
and with a note of curious delight.

"You're _too_ amusing!" she said. "What made you?... How did you
think of it all?... Are you just beginning?"

"Oh, I began twenty years ago," he smiled back, "but I haven't done
anything in the meantime."

Again she laughed with that ring of mischievous delight. "However
you could think of it all! I shan't tell on you--but she'll _never_
be done wondering." She turned away, her pretty face still bright
with humor, and then she turned back hesitantly toward him.

"It _is_ hot here in this sun," she said. "It _can't_ be good for
you. Shall we drive you back?"

She had lovely eyes, dark, smoky-blue under black lashes, and when
they held a gentle, half-shy, half-proud invitation, as they did
then, they were very unsettling eyes.... And it was hot on that
infernal camp stool. And there was a crick in the back of his neck
and his errand was glaringly a fool's errand....

He half rose, and as he did so the door in the palace opened a crack
and a veiled face peered furtively out. Billy sat down again.

"No, thank you," he said, "I think I'd better do a little more of
this."

In such light ways is the gate of opportunity closed and opened.
Everything that happened afterwards with such appalling
startlingness hung on that instant's decision.

For the moment he felt himself a donkey as Lady Claire turned
quietly away and the victoria rattled off with brisk finality. Then
the door opened again, and again the girl peered out, and furtively,
stealthily slipped just outside.

Billy caught up a pad and a pencil and called out a request to
sketch her, holding up some silver. Instantly she assumed a fixed
pose, with a nervous giggle behind her veil, and he came quickly
near her, pretending to be drawing. Her dark, curious eyes met his
with questioning significance, and he threw all caution aside and
plunged into his demands.

Did she want to earn money, he said quickly, in the Arabic he had
been preparing for such an encounter, and on her eager assent, he
asked if there was a foreign lady in the palace, an American.

The flash of her eyes told him that he had struck the mark before
her half-frightened words came.

His heart quickened with excitement. He might have suspected this
thing--but he had not really believed it! He asked, stammering in
his haste, "Does she want to get away?"

Again that knowing nod and the quick assent. Then the girl burst
into low-toned speech, glancing back constantly through the door she
held nearly shut behind her. Billy was forced to shake his head. It
was one thing to have picked up a little casual Arabic, and another,
and horribly different, thing to comprehend the rapid outpourings
behind that muffling veil.

Baffled, he went hurriedly on with his own questionings. Was this
lady safe? Again the nod and murmur of assent. Did she want help?
Vehement the confirmation. He repeated, with careful emphasis, "I
will reward you well for your help," and this time the direct
simplicity of her reply was entirely intelligible:

"How much?"

"One pound.... Two," he added, as she shook her head.

"Four," she demanded.

It was maddening to haggle, but it would be worse to yield.

"Two--and this," said Billy, drawing out the gold and some silver
with it.

She gave a frightened upward glance at the windows over them and
stepped closer. "I take it," she said. "Listen--" and that was all
that Billy could understand of the swift words she whispered to him.

"Slower--slower," he begged. "Once more--slower."

She frowned, and then, very slowly and distinctly, she articulated,
"_T'âla lil genaina ... 'end eltura_."

He wrote down what he thought it sounded like. "Go on."

"_Allailade_," she continued.

"That's to-night," he repeated. "What else?"

"_Assâa 'ashara_," she added hurriedly, and then, intelligible
again, "Now, quick, the money."

"Hold on, hold on." He was in despair. "Go over that again, please,"
and hastily the girl whispered the words again and he wrote down his
corrections. Then with a flourish he appeared to finish the sketch
and held out the gold and silver to her, saying, "Thank you,"
carelessly.

Quick as a flash she seized the money, leaving a little crumpled
ball of white linen in his hand, and then, apparently by lightning,
she secreted the gold, and with the silver shining in her dark palm
she came closer to him, urging him for another shilling, another
shilling for having a picture made. In an undertone she demanded,
"Is it yes? Shall I say yes to the lady?"

"Yes, yes, yes," said Billy, desperately, to whatever the unknown
message might be. "Take a note to her for me?" he demanded, starting
to scribble one, but she drew back with a quick negation, and as a
sound came from the palace she slipped back through the door and was
gone like a shadow when a blind is thrown open.

Only the crumpled little ball of linen remained in Billy's hand. He
straightened it out. It was a lady's handkerchief, a dainty thing,
delicately scented. In the corners were marvels of sheer embroidery
and among the leaves he found the initial he was seeking. It was the
letter B.

As he stared down on it, that tiny, telltale initial, his face went
white under its tan and his mouth compressed till all the humor and
kindliness of it were lost in a line of stark grimness. And then he
swung on his heel and packed up his painting kit in a fury of haste,
and with one last, upturned look at those mocking windows, he was
off down the road like a shot.

There were just two things to do. The first was to discover the
message hidden in those unknown words.

The second was to do exactly as that message bade.




CHAPTER XI

OVER THE GARDEN WALL


Two oil lamps flared in the little coffee-house. In one circle of
yellow light two bearded Sheiks were playing dominoes with
imperturbable gravity; the other lamp flickered over an empty table
beneath which the thin, flea-bitten legs of a ragged urchin were
showing in the oblivion of his tired sleep. In the shadow beyond sat
a young American with a keen, impatient face, and a one-eyed Arab
shrouded in a huge burnous.

"I make fine dragoman?" the Arab was saying proudly. "This is ver'
old coffee-house. Many things happen here, ver' strange----"

"Yes, but I'm sick of the doggone place," said Billy fiercely. "I
can't sit still and swallow coffee any longer. Can't we start now?"

"Too soon--too soon before the time. You say ten? Come, we go next
door. Nice place next door, perhaps--dancing, maybe."

There was noise enough next door, certainly, to promise dancing. The
strident notes of Oriental music came shrieking out the open
doorway, but as Billy stepped within and stared over the heads of
the squatting throng, he saw no sinewy dancers, but only two tiny
girls in bright colors huddled wearily against the wall. The music
which was absorbing every look came from the brazen throat of a huge
instrument in the corner.

"Lord--a phonograph!" thought the young man in disgust, resenting
this intrusion of the genius of his race into foreign fields.

The squatting men, their dark lips parted in pleased smiles, were
too intent upon the innovation to turn at his entrance, but the
little girls caught sight of him and ran forward, begging
clamorously, their bracelets clanking on their outstretched arms.

With a little silver he tried to soften the vigor of the one-eyed
man's dismissal. "This cheap place--no good dancers any more," the
Arab uttered in disgust. "New man here--no good. Maybe next door
better--eh?"

But next door was only a flight of steps and a lone little doll of a
sentinel, painted and hung like a bedizened idol. Only the dark eyes
in the tinted sockets were alive, and these turned curiously after
the strange young white man who had dropped a coin into her
outstretched hand and passed on so hurriedly.

"I don't want any more of these joints," Billy was saying vehemently
to his harassed guide. "It's dark as the Styx now--let's be on our
way."

The street they were on was narrow enough for any antiquarian, but
the one into which the Arab guide now turned was so narrow that the
jutting bays of the houses seemed pushing their faces impudently
against their neighbors. A voice in one room could have been heard
as clearly in the one over the way. It was a mean little street,
squalid and poor and pitiful, but it maintained its stripped
dignities of screened windows and isolation. It was better not to
wonder what nights were like in those women's rooms in summer heat.

The lane-like path stopped at a rickety sort of wharf, and at their
approach a black head bobbed quickly up from a waiting boat. It was
the little boy who had shadowed the Captain that day--reporting his
arrival at the Khedivial palace--and he climbed out now and sat on
the wharf, watching curiously while Billy and his guide bestowed
themselves in the long canoe, and pushed silently away.

It was an eerie backwater in which they were paddling, a sluggish
stream which moved between dark houses. Sometimes it scraped against
their sides and lapped their balconies; sometimes it was held in
check by walls and narrow terraces. For Billy the water between the
dark houses, the mirrored stars, the unexpected flare of some oil
lamp and its still reflection, the long windings and the stagnant
smells held their suggestions of Venice for his senses, and he
thought the business he was going about was very similar to the
business which had brought so many of the gentry of Venice to sudden
and undesired ends.

The flies were horribly thick here. They settled upon the faces and
arms of the paddlers, totally unapprehensive of rebuff. Billy's
flesh crawled. He finished the swarm with a ringing slap that
brought a low caution from his guide.

Now the canal was wider and shallower. The houses receded, and a
field or so appeared, and frequent walls hedged the way. Then
suddenly the houses came down again to the water, and the ruins of
old mosques and palaces lined the banks for a time; to be replaced
by walls again. The windings were interminable, and just when he was
thinking that his silent guide was as confused as he was, the man
made a sudden gesture to the right bank where a tiny strip of land
showed above the water clinging to a high brick wall, and with
careful, soundless strokes they brought the canoe up to that land.

Billy looked at his watch. It was nearly ten. Hurriedly he climbed
out, taking out the stout, notched pole and the knotted rope with
the iron hook at the end which he had prepared. The message which
had been so unintelligible to him was very simple. "Escape by canal
to-night--come to garden at ten," had been the words, and Billy, on
hearing the description of the canal from the one-eyed man, had felt
he understood.

"You're sure this is the place?" he demanded, and on the man's much
injured protestation, "Because if it isn't I'll wring your neck
instead of Kerissen's," he cheerfully promised and set his pole
against the wall, showing the man how to steady it. It was not the
best climbing arrangement in the world, but time had been extremely
limited, and the one-eyed man not inclined to pursue any
investigations which would advertise their expedition.

Wrapping the rope about his shoulders, he started to pull himself up
that notched pole the Arab was holding against the wall, feeling
desperately for any hold for toes and fingers in the rough chunks
between the old bricks, and breathing hard he reached the top and
threw one leg over. He felt something grind through the serge of his
trousers and sting into the flesh.

"Ground glass--the Old Boy!" said Billy through his teeth. He
hoisted himself cautiously, and with his handkerchief swept the top
of the wall as clean as he could. He heard the little pieces fall
with a perilously loud tinkling sound, and flattened himself upon
the wall, and strained his eyes through the darkness of the garden,
but no alarm was raised. The shadows seemed empty.

He hoped to the Lord that no disturbance would break out in the
garden, for the man below would be off in the canoe like a flash. He
had no illusions about the one-eyed man's loyalty, but the fellow
was already in the secret; he was needy and resourceful and as
trustworthy as any dragoman that he could have gone to. And a
dragoman would have had a reputation and a patronage he'd fear to
lose. This melancholy Arab, hawking crocodiles for a Greek Jew, had
more to gain than lose.

By now he had caught the end of the rough hook over the top of the
wall, and let down the knotted rope into the garden below. It was
long enough, thank goodness, he thought, wondering under what
circumstances and in what company he would ascend it again. Then
with one more keen look into the garden, and a reassuring touch of
the pocket where his revolver bulged, he gripped the rope and
swiftly lowered himself.

Keeping close to the wall he pressed toward the buildings on the
right, which he had been told was the wing of the harem, and as he
stepped forward a flat black shadow near the wall came suddenly to
life. It sprang to its feet, revealing a shrouded little form,
wrapped and hooded in black, and ran to him with steps that stumbled
in excitement.

"Quick, quick!" breathed an almost inaudible voice of terror, and
Billy flung one strong arm about the girl and dashed toward the
dangling rope. Gripping it with one hand he flung the light figure
over his left shoulder, and with a cheerily whispered "Hang tight,"
he threw himself into the ascent. It was arm-wrenching,
muscle-racking work, with that dead weight upon him, but the touch
of those soft arms clinging childishly about his neck seemed to
double and treble his strength, and with incredible quickness he
lifted her to the top of the wall, and then, catching her by the
wrists, he lowered her into the upreaching clasp of the Arab.

An instant more and he had reversed his rope ladder and climbed down
beside her as she stood waiting, and in the throbbing triumph of
that moment he flung his arm grippingly about her to sweep her into
the boat. But as she raised her face to his, the shrouding mantle
fell away, and he found himself staring down into the exultant face
and bright, dark eyes of a girl he had never seen before.

Back of them beyond the wall, pandemonium was breaking out.

  [Illustration: "He found himself staring down into the bright dark
  eyes of a girl he had never seen"]




CHAPTER XII

THE GIRL FROM THE HAREM


He was dumb with the shock. Then, "Who are you?" he demanded. "And
where is she--where is Arlee Beecher?"

On her own face the astonishment grew. "What you mean? Frederick--he
not send you?" she gasped, and then as the outcries grew louder and
louder behind them she gripped convulsively at his arms. "Oh, quick!
come away--quick, quick!" she besought.

"I came for Arlee Beecher--an American girl. Isn't she held here?
Isn't she back there?"

"What you going to do? What----"

"I'm going to get her!" he said fiercely. "Tell me----"

He had caught her and unconsciously shook her as if to shake the
words out of her. Furiously she struggled with him.

"Let me go. No, no, she is not there! No one is there! You are gone
crazy to stay! They will kill me if they catch me--they will fire
over the wall. Oh, for God's sake, help me quick!"

"She's not there?" he repeated stupidly, and then at her vehement
"No, _no_! I tell you _no_!" he drew a breath of deep astonishment
and chagrin, and turned to stow her safely low in the boat.
Hurriedly he and the one-eyed man bent over their paddles, and very
swiftly the long, dark canoe went gliding down the stream, but not
any too swiftly, for in an instant they heard a triumphant yell
behind them, and then light, thudding feet along the path.

Steadily Billy urged the canoe forward with powerful strokes that
seemed to be lifting it out of the water at each impulse, and they
swept past a wall that reaching to the river bank must block their
pursuers for a time, and though there was a path after that, there
was soon another wall, and no more pursuit along the water edge. But
every opening ahead now might mean an ambush, and as soon as a
narrow lane showed between the houses to the left, the one-eyed man
steered swiftly there and Billy sprang out with the girl and they
raced through the lane into the adjoining street.

He looked up and down it; either they had got out at the wrong lane
or the cab they had ordered to be in waiting had failed them, but
there was no time for speculation and they walked on as fast as they
could without the appearance of flight. The stray loiterers on the
dark street stared curiously as they passed, to see a young American
in gray tweeds, his cap pulled over his eyes, with a woman in the
Mohammedan wrap and mantle, but no one stopped them, and in another
minute they saw a lonely cab rattling through the streets and
climbed quickly in.

"And now, for Heaven's sake, tell me all about it!" besought Billy
B. Hill, staring curiously at his most unforeseen companion.

With a deep-drawn sigh of relief she had snuggled back against the
cushioned seat, and now she flung off the shrouding mantle and
looked up to meet his gaze with a smile of excited triumph.

She had the prettiest teeth he had ever seen, lovely little rows of
pearls, and the biggest and brightest of dark eyes with wide lashes
curling dramatically back. Even in the thrill and elation of the
moment there was a spark of provocation in those eyes for the
good-looking young man who stared down at her, and Billy would have
been a very wooden young man, indeed, if he had not felt a tingling
excitement in this unexpected capture, for all the destruction of
his romantic plans. So this, he thought rapidly, was the foreign
girl in Kerissen's house, and Arlee, bless her little golden head,
was safe where she planned, in Alexandria. A warm glow of happiness
enveloped him at that.

"Now tell me all about it," he demanded again. "You are running away
from Kerissen?"

"Oh, yes," she cried eagerly. "You must not let him catch us. We are
safe--yes?"

"I should rather think so," Billy laughed. "And there's a gun in my
pocket that says so.... And so you sent me that message to-day by
that little native girl? How in the world did that happen?"

"That girl is one who will do a little for money, you understand,"
said the Viennese, "and I have told her to look sharp out for a
foreign gentleman who come to save me. You see I have sent for a
friend, and I think that he--but never mind. That girl she come
running this afternoon to where I am shut in way back in the palace,
and she say that a foreign gentleman is painting a picture out in
the street, and he stare very cunning at her. So I tell her to find
out if he is the one for me, and to tell him to come quick this
night. She was afraid to take note--afraid the eunuch catch her. So
she went to you. She told afterwards that you ask her if there is
any strange lady there anxious to get away, and she give you the
message and my handkerchief and you say you will come--and my, how
you give me one great surprise!"

"And a great disappointment," said Billy grinning.

"Oh, no, no," she denied, eyes and lips all mischievous smiles. "I
say to myself, 'My God! That is a fine-looking young man! He and I
will have something to say to each other'--h'm?"

"Now who in the world are you?" demanded Billy bluntly. "And how did
you happen to get into all this?"

Volubly she told. She dwelt at picturesque length upon her shining
place upon the Viennese stage; she recounted her triumphs, she
prophesied the joy of the playgoers at her return to them. Darkly
she expatiated upon the villainy of the Turkish Captain, who had
lured her to such incarceration. Gleefully she displayed the
diamonds upon her small person which she was extracting from that
affair.

"Not so bad, after all--h'm?" she demanded, in a brazen little
content. "Maybe that prison time make good for me," and Billy shook
his head and chuckled outright at the little baggage.

But through his amusement a prick of uneasiness was felt. The
picture she had painted of the Captain corroborated his wildest
imaginings.

"You're dead sure you know all that was going on in that palace?" he
demanded. "There wasn't any American girl coaxed into it on some
pretext?"

He wanted merely the reassurance of her answer, but to his surprise
and growing alarm she hesitated, looking at him half fearfully and
half ashamedly. "Oh, I--I don't know about that," she murmured, with
evasive eyes. "An American girl--very light hair--yes?"

"Very light hair--Oh, good God!" He leaned forward, gripping her
wrist as if afraid she would spring out of the carriage. "You said
she wasn't there," he thrust at her in a voice that rasped.

"I said I don't know--don't know any such name you say. I never hear
it. You hurt me--take your hand away."

"Not till you tell me." But he loosened his harsh grip. "Now tell me
all you know--_please_ tell me all you know," he besought with a
sudden melting into desperate entreaty. Worriedly he stared at this
curious little kitten-thing beside him on whose truth now that other
girl's life was resting.

"Well, I tell you true I do not know that name," began Fritzi
Baroff, with a little sullen dignity over her shame. "And I saved
your life, for it was death for you to go back to that palace. You
heard them coming for us. You would have got yourself killed and
that little girl would be no better. Now I can tell you how to help
her."

"All right--tell me," said the young American in a tense voice.
"Tell me everything you know about it," and Fritzi told him,
throwing aside all pretense of her uncertainty about Arlee,
revealing every detail of the situation that she knew.

And from the heights of his gay relief Billy Hill was flung back
into the deeps of desperate indignation. The anger that had surged
up in him that afternoon when he had felt his fears confirmed flamed
up in him now in a fire of fury. His blood was boiling.... Arlee
Beecher in the power of that Turkish devil! Arlee Beecher prisoned
within that ghastly palace! It was unreal. It was monstrous.... That
radiant girl he had danced with, that teasing little sprite, half
flouting, half flirting. Why, the thing was unthinkable!

He put a hand on the dancer's arm. "We must go to the consul at
once," he said. "We must get her out to-night."

"Consul!" The girl gave a short, derisive laugh. "This is no matter
for consuls, my young friend. The law is slow, and by the time that
law will stand knocking upon the palace doorstep, your little girl
with the fair hair will be buried very deep and fast--I think she
would not be the first woman bricked into those black walls.... You
must go about this yourself.... You are in love with her--yes?" she
added impertinently, with keen, uptilted eyes.

"That's another story," Billy curtly informed her. He made no
attempt to analyze his feeling for Arlee Beecher. She had enchanted
him in those two days that he had known her. She had obsessed his
thoughts in those two days of her disappearance. Now that he was
aware of her peril every selfish thought was overwhelmed in burning
indignation. He told himself that he would do as much for any girl
in her situation, and, indeed, so hot ran his rage and so dearly did
his young blood love rash adventure and high-handed justice, that
there was some honest excuse for the statement!

"Zut! A man does not risk his neck for a matter of indifference!"
said the little Baroff sagely, her knowing eyes on Billy's grim
young face. "So I am to be the sister to you--the Platonic
friend--h'm?" she observed with droll resignation. "Never mind--I
will help you get her out as you got me--_Gott sei dank!_ There is a
way, I think--if you are not too particular about that neck. I will
tell you all and draw you a plan when we get to a hotel."

But before they got to a hotel there was an obstacle or two to be
overcome. A lady in Mohammedan wraps might not be exactly _persona
grata_ at fashionable hotels at midnight. Casting off the wrap
Fritzi revealed herself in a little pongee frock that appeared to be
suitable for traveling, and with two veils and Billy's cap for a
foundation she produced an effect of headgear not unlike that of
some bedraped tourists.

"I arrived on the night train," she stated as they drew up before
the shining hotel. "It is late now for that night train--but we
waited for my luggage, which you will observe is lost. So I pay for
my room in the advance--I think you had better give me some money
for that--I have nothing but these," and she indicated her flashing
diamonds.

"My name," said Billy, handing over some sovereigns with the first
ray of humor since her revelation to him, "my name, if you should
care to address me, is Hill--William B. Hill."

"William B. Hill," she echoed with an air of elaborate precision,
and then flashed a saucy smile at him as he helped her out of the
carriage. "What you call Billy, eh?"

"You've got it," he replied in resignation.

"Hill--that means a mountain," she commented. "A mountain of good
luck for me--h'm? And that B--what is that for?"

"My middle name," said Billy patiently, as they reached the door the
Arab doorman was holding open for them.

Absently she laughed. Her dark eyes were sparkling at the vision of
the safe and shining hotel, the dear familiar luxury, the sounds and
sights of her lost Continental life. A few late arrivals from some
dance gave a touch of animation to the wide rooms, and Fritzi's eyes
clung delightedly to the group.

"God, how happy I am!" she sighed.

Billy was busy avoiding the clerk's knowing scrutiny. It was the
same clerk he had coerced with real cigars to enlighten him
concerning Arlee Beecher, and he felt that that clerk was thinking
things about him now, mistaken and misguided things, about his
predilections for the ladies. Philosophically he wondered where they
had better try after this.

But he underestimated the battery of Fritzi's charms, or else the
serene assurance of her manner.

"My letters--letters for Baroff," she demanded of the clerk. "None
yet. Then my room, please.... But I sent a wire from Alexandria.
That stupid maid," she turned to explain to Billy, her air the last
stand of outraged patience. "She is at the train looking for that
luggage she lost," she added to the clerk, and thereupon she
proceeded to arrange for the arrival of the fictitious maid whom
Billy heard himself agreeing to go back and fetch if she did not
turn up soon, and to engage a room for herself--a much nicer room
than Billy himself was occupying--then handed over Billy's
sovereigns and turned happily away jingling the huge key of her
room.

"It is a miracle!" she cried again, exultant triumph in every pretty
line of her. "My heart dances, my blood is singing--Oh, if I were on
the stage now, the music crashing, the lights upon me, the house
packed! I would enchant them! I would dance myself mad.... Ah, what
you say now--shall we have a little bottle of champagne to drink to
our better acquaintance, Mr. Billy?"

"Not this evening," said the unemotional young man. "You are going
to sit down at this desk and draw me those plans of the palace."

Petulantly she shrugged at her rescuer. "How stupid--to-morrow you
may not have that chance for the champagne," she observed. "You
think of nothing but to go back and get killed, then? And I must
help you? Very well. Here, I will draw it for you and I will tell
you all I know."

She sat down at a desk and began working out the diagrams, and at
last she handed the paper to Billy, who sat beside her, and pointed
out the rooms and scribbled the words on them for his aid.

"It is very simple," she said. "That first square is for the court,
and the next square is for the garden. The hall of banquets comes
so, between them, and the hall is two stories tall, and across the
top of that, from the _selamlik_ to the harem, runs that little
secret passage. And at the end of it, here, is the little panel into
the rose room where she is, and beside the panel outside in the
passage are the little steps that go up to that tower room, where
they put me on the top. And from that top room I broke out a locked
door on the roof--that is how I got away. I climbed down at the end
of the harem from one roof to another where it is unfinished.... The
rose room is here on the garden, but the windows have bars, and
those bars are too strong for breaking. I have tried it! There is no
way out but the secret way by that passage into the men's wing, or
the other way through the door into the long hall and down the
little stairs into the anteroom below. How Seniha hated me when I
made laughter and noise and talk going up and down those stairs to
my motor car!"

She laughed impishly, pointing out Seniha's rooms, facing on the
street, and contributing several bizarre anecdotes of the palace
life. But Billy was not to be diverted, and went over the plans
again and again, before the diminished number of lights and the
hoverings of the attendant Arabs recalled the lateness of the hour
to his absorption.

But late as they were they were not the only occupants of the lift.
Returning from a masquerade, a domino over his arm, stood Falconer.
Civilly enough he returned Billy's greeting, with no apparent
awareness of the little lady in pongee, but Billy was conscious that
her flaunting caliber had been promptly registered. And to his
annoyance the actress raised big eyes of reproach to him.

"No champagne for me, after all, Mr. Billy!" she sighed. "You are
not very good for a celebration--h'm?... Well, then--good night."

Her parting smile as she left the car adroitly included the tall
aristocratic young Englishman with the little moustache.

Sharply Billy turned to him. "Come up to my room, please. I have
something to say to you."

In silence Falconer followed. Billy flung shut the door, drew a long
breath, and turned to him.

"Do you know where I got that girl?" he demanded.

It took several seconds of Falconer's level-lidded look of distaste
to bring home the realization.

"Oh, see here," he protested, "wait till you understand this
thing.... I pulled that girl over Kerissen's back wall at ten
o'clock to-night. I thought she was Miss Beecher, but a mistake had
been made and the wrong girl arrived. But the point is this--_Arlee
Beecher is in that palace_. This girl saw her and talked with her
last night. Now we've got to get her out. It's a two-man job," said
Billy, "or you'd better believe I'd never have come to you again."

He had given it like a punch, and it knocked the breath out of
Falconer for one floored instant. But he was no open-mouthed
believer. The thing was more unthinkable to him than to Billy's
romantic and adventurous mind, and the very notion was so revolting
that he fought it stoutly.

From beginning to end Billy hammered over the story as he knew it,
explaining, arguing, debating, and then he drew out the plans of the
palace and flung them on the table by Falconer while he continued
his excited tramping up and down the room.

Falconer studied the plans, worried his moustache, stared at Billy's
tense and resolute face, and took up the plans again, his own chin
stubborn.

"Granted there's a girl--you can't be sure it's Miss Beecher," he
maintained doggedly. "This Baroff girl had no idea of her name. Now
Miss Beecher would have told her name, the very first thing, it
appears to me, and the names of her friends in Cairo, asking for the
Baroff's offices in getting a letter to me--us."

"She may have been too hurried to get to it. She had so many
questions to ask. And she probably expected to see the girl again
the next day or night."

"Possibly," said Falconer without conviction.

"But where, then, is Miss Beecher?"

"We may hear from her to-morrow morning."

"We won't," said Billy.

Falconer was silent.

"Good Lord!" the American burst out, "there can't be two girls in
Cairo with blue eyes and fair hair whom Kerissen could have lured
there last Wednesday! There can't be two girls with chaperons
departing up the Nile! Why--why--the whole thing's as clear to
me--as--as a house afire!"

"I don't share your conviction."

"Very well, then, if you don't think it is Miss Beecher, you don't
have to go into this thing. If you can feel satisfied to lay the
matter before the ambassador and let that unknown girl wait for the
arm of the law to reach her, you are at perfect liberty, of course,
to do so." Billy was growing colder and colder in tone as he grew
hotter and hotter in his anger.

Falconer said nothing. He was a very plucky young man, but he had no
liking at all for strange and unlawful escapades. He didn't
particularly mind risking his neck, but he liked to do it in
accredited ways, in polo, for instance, or climbing Swiss peaks, or
swimming dangerous currents.... But he was young--and he had red
hair. And he remembered Arlee Beecher. These three days had not been
happy ones for him, even sustained as he was by righteous
indignation. And if there was any chance that this prisoned girl was
Arlee, as this infatuated American was so furiously sure--He
reflected that Billy was doing the sporting thing in giving him the
chance of it.

"I'll join you," he said shortly. "I can't let it go, you know, if
there's a chance of its being Miss Beecher."

"Good!" said Billy, holding out his hand and the two young men
clasped silently, eyeing each other with a certain mutual respect
though with no great increase of liking.

"Now, this is my idea," Billy went on, and proceeded to develop it,
while Falconer carefully studied the plans and made a shrewd
suggestion here and there.

It was late in the morning when they parted.

"You must muzzle that Baroff girl," was Falconer's parting caution.
"We must keep this thing deuced quiet, you know."

"Of course. He shan't get wind of it ahead."

"Not only that. We mustn't have talk afterwards. It would kill the
girl, you know."

Billy nodded. "She would hate it, I expect."

"Hate it? My word, it would finish her--a tale of that kind going
the rounds.... She could never live it down."

"Live it down? It would set her up in conversation for the rest of
her life!" Billy chuckled softly. "That is, if it comes out all
right--and that's the only way I can imagine its coming out."

With one hand on the door Falconer paused to stare back at him. "You
don't mean she'd want to _tell_ about it!" he ejaculated with
unplumbed horror.

Billy was suddenly sobered. "Well, nobody but you and I and the
Baroff know it now," he said, "and I think we can keep the Baroff's
mouth shut.... I'll see her in the morning. You'd better get in a
nap to-morrow, and I will, too, for we'll want steady nerves. Good
night; I'm glad you're going with me."

"I'm damned if I'm glad," said the honest Englishman, with a wry
grin. "If we get our throats cut, I hope Miss Beecher will return
from the desert in time for our obsequies."

"Something in that red-headed chap I like after all," soliloquized
Billy B. Hill, as he turned toward his long-deferred repose. "Hanged
if he hasn't grit to go into a thing on an off chance!... Now, as
for me, I'm _sure_."




CHAPTER XIII

TAKING CHANCES


Late as he went to sleep, Billy B. Hill was up in good season that
Sunday morning. The need for cautioning Fritzi Baroff haunted him,
and he was not satisfied until he had had breakfast with that lively
young lady and laid down the law to her upon the situation.

She was very loath not to talk about herself at first. She wanted to
tell her tale to the papers and see if one of them would be hardy
enough to publish the story of the outrageous incarceration; she
wanted to cable the Viennese theater where she had played of her
sensational detention--in short, she wanted to get all the possible
publicity out of her durance vile and to advertise her small person
from Cairo to the Continent.

But Billy was urgent. "You just bide a wee on this publicity stunt,"
he demanded. "Cable your manager and press agent all you want
to--but don't talk around the hotel here--and whatever you do and
whatever you say, keep Miss Beecher's name and mine out of it."

He was very decided about that, and because she was very grateful to
him and because she liked him and because she lacked other friends
and other pocketbooks, the little Viennese held her tongue as
directed. And she borrowed as much money as Billy would lend her,
and drove off to the small shops which were open that day, and found
a frock or two and a hat which she declared passable, and returned
transfigured to the hotel and rendered the table where she lunched
with Billy, with the air of possessing him, quite the most
conspicuous in the room. The ladies gazed past them with chill eyes;
the men stared covertly, with the surreptitious envy with which even
the most virtuous of men surveys a lucky devil. And Billy sadly
perceived that he was acquiring a reputation.

He did not blame Miss Falconer for turning haughtily aside as he and
his vivid companion went past them in the veranda. But he did think
her disdainful lack of memory a little overdone.

His cheeks were still red as he looked away from her and encountered
the direct eyes of the girl who followed her.

"Oh, how do you do, Mr. Hill?" said Lady Claire, as clear as a
bell. "It's _such_ a nice day, isn't it?" she added, a little
breathlessly, as she went by.

"It's much better than it was," said Billy, and he turned back to
open the door for her.

"Claire!" said Miss Falconer from within.

"Coming, dear," said Lady Claire, and with a little smile of defiant
friendliness at the young American she was gone.

But the memory of that plucky little smile stayed right with Billy.
The girl liked him, she liked him in spite of his unknown
antecedents, his preposterous picture, his conspicuous companion.
She had a mind of her own, that tall English girl with the lovely
eyes and the proud mouth. In a warm surge of friendliness his
thoughts went out to her, and he wished vaguely that he could let
her know how fine he thought she was.

Within an hour that vague wish came true. He had packed Fritzi off,
with a newly acquired maid, for a drive up and down the safe public
streets and he had re-interviewed the one-eyed man and the native
chauffeur that the one-eyed man introduced for the evening's work,
and he was at one of the public desks in the writing room, inditing
a letter to his aunt, which, he whimsically appreciated, might be
his last mortal composition, and reflecting thankfully that it was
highly unnecessary to make a will, when Lady Claire strolled into
the room and over to a desk.

She tried a pen frowningly, and Billy jumped to offer another. "Oh,
thank you," she said. She seemed not to have seen him before.

"That was rather nice of you, you know," he said gravely.

She looked up at him.

"I'm not really a wolf," he continued, the gravity surrendering to
his likable, warm smile, "and I'm glad you recognized it."

Her reply took him unawares. "I think you're _splendid_," said Lady
Claire. "I thought so in the bazaars when you came to my help and
stood up to that _beastly_ German."

"Oh, he wasn't such a beastly German, after all," Billy deprecated.
"And here I've had a message to you from him and never remembered to
give it. The fellow called on me the next morning in gala attire and
offered every apology and satisfaction in his power--even the
satisfaction of the duel, if I desired it. I didn't. But I promised
to express his deep apologies to you. He was horribly shocked at
himself. He'd been drinking, he said, to forget a 'sadness' which
possessed him. His lady love had failed to keep her tryst and life
was very dark."

"I don't wonder at her," said Lady Claire unforgivingly. "I'm sure
he must have been horrid to her!"

"I rather think she was horrid to him," Billy reflected, "although
she was a very sprightly looking lady love. He showed me her picture
in the back of his watch.... By _George_!" he uttered violently.

"What is it?"

"Oh--an idea, that's all. Something I must really attend to before
I--this afternoon, I mean. But there's no hurry about it," he added
cheerily.

Oh, Billy, Billy! Not even with his blood hot with thoughts of the
evening's work, not even with his memory ridden with Arlee's gay
witchery, could he keep his restless young eyes from laughing down
at her. But there wasn't a notion in the back of his honest head as
to the picture he was making in Lady Claire's eyes as he leaned,
long-limbed, broad-shouldered, lazily at ease against the desk, his
gray eyes very bright between their dark lashes, his dark hair
sweeping back from his wide forehead.

"Are you sure?" she asked of him, with the smile that he drew from
her. "Is it the inspiration for another picture?"

"No, no--that was my first and my last. That was the one purple
bloom of my art. I have laid my brushes by.... But I'm keeping you
from that letter you were going to write."

"It's just a few lines for Miss Falconer," Lady Claire unnecessarily
explained. "We are going to drive out to the Gezireh Palace Hotel
for tea, and she thought her brother might like to go out with us if
he came in in time."

She did not add why Miss Falconer was unable to write her own notes,
but slanted her blue-hatted head over the desk and then hastily
blotted her brief lines and tucked the sheet into an envelope.
Hesitantly she looked up at Billy.

"Have you been out to the Gezireh Palace?" she very innocently
inquired.

"Alone," said Billy.

"It's very jolly there," said she. "It's so gay--and the music is
_quite_ good."

"H'm," meditated Billy. "The condemned man ate a hearty tea of
Orange Pekoe and cress sandwiches," he reflected silently. He also
reflected that Miss Falconer would be furious--and that invited
him--and that time was interminable and that this expedition was as
good a way of getting through the afternoon as any other. Thereupon
he turned to the English girl, with a humorous challenge in his
gaze. "I wonder if you and Miss Falconer would let this be my tea
party?" he suggested.

"Miss Falconer will be delighted," said Lady Claire mendaciously.

The traces of that delight, however, lay beneath so well schooled an
exterior that they were decidedly non-apparent. Nor did Robert
Falconer's mien reveal any hint of joy when he returned to the hotel
and found the two ladies starting with Billy. He joined them with
rather the air of a watch dog, but that air soon wore away during
the long drive under the spell of young Hill's frank friendliness
and gay good humor. For Billy was extravagantly in spirits.
Excitement stirred in him like wine; his blood was on fire with
thoughts of the evening.

"It's the fool _lark_ of the thing," he said, half apologetically,
to Falconer's wonder when the two young men were alone for a minute
on the Gezireh verandas. "Didn't you ever want to be a pirate?"

The red-headed young man nodded. "Yes, but this business doesn't
make me feel like a pirate--more like a second-story man!"

"I've left letters with Fritzi Baroff," said Hill, "and if we're not
back by morning, she's to go to the authorities with them."

"That won't do us any good," said the Englishman grimly.

But after the ladies returned it was a very merry-seeming tea party.
Even Miss Falconer unbent to the artist, as she persisted in calling
Billy, though he had dutifully enlightened her that engineering was
his true and proper life work, and art but a random diversion, and
she promised to show him the sketches which she had been making,
and piled him with questions about his mysterious America.

And Lady Claire was very prettily animated, and rallied Falconer
upon his absent-mindedness and told Billy tales of her English home
and how her father had threatened to change the name of the Hall to
_Mädchenheim_ because there were five daughters of them. "_Five_
girls near an age, Mr. Hill, and all poor as church mice!" she had
blithely asserted.

But from what Billy heard of balls and hunters and "seasons," he
gleaned that being poor as church mice, for these five titled girls,
meant merely an effort in keeping up with the things they felt
should be theirs by right divine. And as Billy listened, feeling the
force of the girl's attraction, the charm of her serene confidence
and the pleasant air of security and well-being that hedged her in,
he stole a covert glance at Falconer's unrevealing countenance and
reflected that it was rather a stormy day for that young man when he
became entangled with the fortunes of little Miss Beecher. It was
also a stormy day for himself, but he felt that storms belonged more
naturally to his adventurous lot.

       *       *       *       *       *

But it was characteristic of Falconer when once committed to a plan
not to open his mind to the objections which besieged it. So that
night, at the fall of dark, as the two young men motored forth
together, he maintained a stolid resolution which refused to look
back. The approach of the danger was tuning up his nerves, and
whatever his common sense might think about it, his youth and pluck
greeted the adventure with a quickening heart and a rash warmth of
blood.

Both young men were resolute and confident. Either would have been
more than human if he had not looked a trifle askance upon the other
and wished to thunder that he had been able to go into it alone and
to have tasted the intoxication of delivering the girl single-handed
out of the den of thieves. But the success of the plan was
paramount, as Billy reminded himself.

He found himself hoping wildly that she would see him as well as
Falconer.

"She has probably forgotten all about me," he thought ruefully. "She
won't remember that dance with me, nor that chat next morning. I'm
just an Also Met. She won't even perceive me. She'll see that
sandy-haired deliverer--and she'll tell him how right he was and how
good to come after her----"

Thus jealousy darkly painted his undoing. "But, darn it, I had to
ask him!" Thus he downed his ungenerous thoughts. "It needed two men
at least--and besides, I don't want any handicap of gratitude in
this."

They left the automobile in the Mohammedan graveyard with exact and
impressive instructions. And then they stole back among the gloomy
trees and ghostly tombs to where the canal washed the foot of the
little terraces, and there the one-eyed man sat waiting in the
canoe, a figure of profound misanthropy.

Silently he lifted a stricken but set countenance, and they climbed
in and the three paddled off, approaching the back of the palace
with wary eyes, for they were afraid that a guard might now be set
upon the walls. But Billy had argued that Kerissen was unaware of
Fritzi's knowledge of Arlee's identity; in fact she had at first
supposed her a willing supplanter like herself, and so he would not
be apprehensive of any of her revelations. And he did not dream that
Fritzi's rescuers were interested in Arlee.

At the strip of path the canoe made softly to shore and the two
young men climbed out, while the Arab remained in the canoe, his
single eye peering into the darkness. This time Billy had provided
three stout, but narrow, ladders, constructed of two poles nailed
together with occasional cross pieces that gave narrow room for a
foot. He set one of these in place against the wall now, grounding
its ends deep in the soft earth, so that it would remain in
readiness for any sudden descent. Then from the top of the wall they
reconnoitered the scene before them.

It was very dark. The garden was full of blotting shadows, and the
long wing of the harem lay almost in darkness, with only a faint
beam from two adjacent windows to reveal a sign of life. Those
windows were on the third story, next the angle made by the union of
the banquet hall and the harem, and Billy's heart quickened as he
recognized the location of the rose room.

"That's it--that's her room," he whispered excitedly to Falconer.

Falconer stared and nodded. "I wish that beastly hall wasn't in the
way ahead of us. I'd like to see what lights are in the windows in
that court beyond."

"We might both go and take a look," said Billy doubtfully, "but I
guess you had better make, straight for your roofs. It wouldn't do
to have us both nabbed. Do you hear anything?"

They listened, crouching flat upon the wall, straining their eyes
toward the palace. There was a high wind blowing and above them the
leaves of the palm trees were slapping against each other, and below
the shrubs and flowers were stirring restlessly. But the noise of
the wind, they felt, was helpful to cover the sounds of their
approach.

"Why can't I make my way around on top of this wall and climb on the
roofs from the start?" Falconer questioned, and Billy answered, "I
asked her that. She said it couldn't be done. You'd have to climb
through some unsafe rubbish. The best way is down and up again in
that angle that she showed me. Shall we start?"

The same impulse made both men examine their revolvers, then drop
them in readiness into their right-hand coat pockets. They moved
along the top of the wall till they reached the angle with the wall
on their right, and then they lowered the same knotted rope which
Billy had used the night before, but now another rope added to it
made it into a rope ladder. Suspending that over the top of the wall
by iron hooks, they slipped down it, each with a pole ladder in his
arms, and with another hook of iron they drove the ends down into
the earth, so that the rope would not wave out in the wind and
either betray them or become displaced.

It was insecure enough, anyway, but they felt it ought to be left in
readiness for a flight that might have no second to waste. Now, with
eyes sharply challenging the shadows, they stole along the edge of
the palace.

Staring up at the building, Billy stopped. "Here's a place a story
and a half high--you could almost climb up by those carvings without
any ladder. And there's the next higher roof back of it--and then
you must go there to the left."

"I can make it," said Falconer, surely. "Now how much time shall I
allow you for your sawing--fifteen minutes?"

"Guess you'd better," Billy reflected, and they compared watches.

It was tremendously difficult to arrive at any sort of concerted
action on this bewildering expedition, but they were hoping to
achieve it. Their plan had the simplicity of all desperate measures.
One from below and one from above they were to make their way to
that rose room and fight the way out with the girl. They considered
it wiser to come from two directions, for if one were discovered and
the alarm raised, the other had still a chance of getting off with
Arlee, and if one were trying to escape, the other could cover his
flight. They had drawn straws for their positions, and Billy had
been slightly relieved that the entrance from below, which he
considered a trifle more difficult, had fallen to him. He felt
responsible, as well as he might, for Falconer's neck.

Now he steadied one narrow ladder of poles while Falconer crept up
it and then drew it up after him; and after a few moments of
waiting, crouched in the shadow, Billy saw the Englishman's figure
reappear against the sky on top of a higher roof. The route over
the old buildings had been found, so Billy turned and crept forward
along the wall, carrying the last long ladder of poles in his hand.
It was an unwieldy thing to carry and it distracted his attention
harassingly.

"My job," said he to himself, "is evidently to make a racket and
draw their fire from below while that red-headed chap carries Arlee
off from above. Well, I hope to the Lord he does. When I think of
her here----"

But it was unnerving to think of her here, so he didn't. He kept his
mind steadily on the plan. He had reached the stone steps that led
from the garden to the harem now, and laying down his pole-like
ladder he slipped up them and turned the handle.

But the door was locked. Fearful lest the grating of the knob should
have roused some watcher, he ran down the steps and hurried into the
shadow of the banquet hall, where he stood close beside a pillar
until he satisfied himself of the objects in the court beyond. He
saw an edge of light along the crack of a closed door to the left on
the ground floor of the _selamlik_, and in the higher stories above
that a couple of windows showed a pale illumination. On the right,
in the harem, only one window betrayed a ray of light. Altogether
the old pile was as gloomy and gruesome as a tomb.

Billy stared across the court to where the columned vestibule,
uniting the two Ls, indicated the door. He had been told a watchman
slept there, but he could see nothing now but vague outlines of the
arches of the vestibule. To the left was the open passage left for
the entry of the automobile and horses, but this, too, was roofed so
that a black shadow lay over it. But for that watchman Billy would
have made his way to those doors to draw back the bars in readiness,
but fearful of raising an alarm, he judged it was better to leave
escape to chance and turn his attention to his entry.

He went back now for his ladder, and on the right side of the
banquet hall, up under the arched roof, he discovered the wooden
grating where Fritzi had described it. Against this wall he placed
his ladder and climbed to the top, from which he could reach up and
clasp the spindles of the grating above him.

He drew himself swiftly up to this, and the end of his pole was
dislodged by his departure and fell to the inlaid pavement with a
bang that seemed to him to carry to the farthest echoes of the
sounding court. Instantly there was an answering clatter of steps.

Like a monkey Billy clung to the grating, thrusting his toes
desperately into the first openings they could find, hanging on with
his hands for dear life, holding himself as close up in the darkness
as he could, and nearly twisting his neck off in the effort to watch
what was going on below him.

The steps sounded nearer and nearer, and a huge Nubian in baggy
bloomers and a short jacket was outlined in the court. His bare feet
were thrust into clattering English shoes. He peered about him for a
time, with one hand pointing the muzzle of a revolver. Billy caught
the unpleasant gleam of it; then the man stepped in underneath the
arches of the hall and made a slow way across it.

Directly in his path lay that fatal pole. It lay along the shadow of
a column, but its end protruded beyond that shadow and would surely
catch his eye. Billy tried to free his right hand to get at a gun of
his own. To be caught ridiculously like this, clutching like a
monkey on a stick----!

Another man, shorter and bent, in a long robe and carrying a
lantern, now emerged from that door along whose closed edge Billy
had noticed the crack of light, and the Nubian diverged toward him.
The pole was unnoticed and the two joined forces and made a slow
circle in the garden. Billy remembered that dangling rope, and with
a thumping heart he hoped that it would hang unregarded in that
shadowed angle, overrun with vines.

Apparently it did, for he heard the footsteps passing on without a
stop as he clung there to his grating, his muscles cramped, his
sockets strained. Slowly the two recrossed the hall, talking
together in low gutturals and not apparently of unpleasant things,
for a note of laughter sounded. They lingered in parley in the
court, but by the time that he thought that he could not hang on a
minute longer and would drop like a peach from the wall, they
separated and each moved slowly away. The man with the lantern shut
the door after him and all was darkness there and the great Nubian
was blotted out beneath the arches of the vestibule.

The fear that Falconer was in the palace alone made Billy desperate.
Clinging with his feet and his left hand, he drew out a clasp knife
with a razor edge and hacked furiously at the delicate spindles and
frail carved work of the screen till he could thrust one arm through
the opening. The work was easier then, but he had to resist the
temptation to seize the brittle stuff and break it in pieces, for
fear the splintering sound would be too sharp.

Torn between caution and impatience he worked on, and as soon as the
hole was large enough he pulled himself cautiously up and dropped
over the edge into the cage-like balcony on the other side. The
panel which separated it from the rest of the old room was half
open, and he stepped through it into what appeared utter darkness.

He stood listening keenly, for he knew that he was standing below
the rose room; the very spot where he was must be almost exactly
beneath that secret passage outside the panel in the rose room's
wall. Not a sound came down to him and he dared not wait longer, but
turned to the left and passed through the arched doorway into the
next great salon.

As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he saw that it was not utter
blackness, but that some wan light from the paler night without
faintly penetrated through those jealously guarded windows--windows
not so heavily screened, he had been told, as those upon the front
of the palace, for these were upon the court. He found time for a
flash of horror at this stifling barricade as he made his hurried
way through the room and stepped out into the little anteroom
beyond.

Here he paused, for he knew that to the left, ahead of him, was the
curtained opening into the long salon upon the street, and within
that, Fritzi had warned him, a eunuch sometimes slept or Seniha
occasionally came from her small salon to play on the piano there
and lingered apparently in wait. But no one seemed stirring, and
Billy stole to the door on his right, opening on the encased stairs,
and found it locked. Hurriedly he pried at it with a burglarious
tool, and then a sudden outburst sounded overhead.

There was a racket of hurrying feet and then a muffled explosion of
a shot. A hoarse voice yelled. Another shot, and then a thud of
something falling.

Desperately Billy fired his gun into the lock. The noise did not
matter now and might serve to divert the fight from Falconer.
Throwing his weight against the shattered lock, he bounded up the
narrow stairs and raced down the long hall to the door that was
brightly gilded. From beyond, but fainter now, came the sounds of
conflict. With a heart beating to suffocation he flung open the door
and rushed into that room.




CHAPTER XIV

IN THE ROSE ROOM


Candles flared on the table but not a figure greeted his eye. The
room was deathly still; nothing stirred but the long draperies
fluttering in the wind.

"Arlee!" he whispered in a voice strained with excitement. "Arlee
Beecher, are you here?... Arlee!"

No voice answered. No motion revealed her. Only the candle flames
danced drunkenly in a puff of air, flaunting their secret knowledge
of the tenant they had lighted.

He darted to the tumbled bed and flung aside the covers; he looked
beneath it and beneath the couch; he sent a candle's light traveling
about the empty whiteness of the bath. No little figure, pitifully
silenced, was, hidden there. The room was empty. And all the while
that din sounded somewhere beyond them--running feet and strident
yells.

"He's got her!" thought Billy, and first his heart leaped and then
it sank. For very dear to that boy's heart had been the dream of
rescuing her himself. And then he hated himself for that base envy.
For what did it matter as long as little Arlee was safe, and that
she was gone with Falconer, the empty room and the signs of hasty
departure all spoke in witness. He wondered sharply how they had
gone and whether he had better try to follow them and then thought
it was shrewder to go back the way he had come and from below to try
to guard whatever descent they must make.

He turned swiftly and crossed to the door. With a hand outstretched
toward it he caught suddenly, beneath all the distant din, the click
of a sliding lock, and he whirled about, dropping his right hand
into his pocket, to see a pale face staring at him from the other
side of the bed.

"Not a move--or you drop!" said Captain Kerissen. The candle lights
glinted on the muzzle of a gun leveled steadily at him.

"Stay where you are," the Captain added, and Billy stayed, and
through the dusk the two men stood eyeing each with a glare of
hatred. But Kerissen's eyes held hatred triumphant.

"So, Monsieur," said the Turk. "This is the midnight call you
gentlemen pay--in the chamber of my wife."

"Your wife!" Billy gave a snort of unbelief. "She says you did not
marry her!"

"When you are found dead--if you are found," the other continued,
looking lovingly along the sight, "there will not even be a question
into the cause. You will be carted off like carrion--carrion that
prowled too near."

"Just the same you've made a mistake," said Billy in a dogged and
argumentative tone. "I'm not interested in visiting any wife of
yours. The lady I'm representing says you didn't marry her. But she
says you did keep back most of her jewelry and she's giving the
story to the papers to-morrow unless I return with the stuff
to-night."

He could not guess what impression this speech was making.

"I am not interested in your stories, Monsieur," the Turk returned
blandly. "I am interested only in your dispatching--which I feel
should be prolonged beyond the mercy of a shot."

"Look here, I'm not a common robber and you know it," said Billy,
and his voice sounded rough and angry. "I'm here to collect the
property of the lady you detained here, while she was under contract
in Vienna. I don't want anything more than _belongs_ to her. She
left----"

"With a great deal more upon her than she brought! But am I to
suppose, Monsieur, that you have made your way here, at some
personal inconvenience, I should say, to discuss the generosity of
my remuneration to the lady?" There was a tense silence and the
Captain continued in a low, almost purring voice, "You do not
appear, even now, to comprehend the thing you have done. I shall do
my best to make you comprehend--and before I have finished it may be
that I shall have a clearer explanation of this impulsive call. You
have no notion, Monsieur, how certain things unloose the tongue--but
you shall discover."

Billy saw his white teeth show in a deadly smile. Back of him a
dark, heavy figure appeared and the Captain, without turning his
head or moving his eyes or his gun from Billy, gave some rapid
directions in Turkish and the figure disappeared. It occurred to
Billy like a flash that from that secret passage where the figure
had appeared there was a panel into the room on the right and that
room had a door opening into the hall outside. The next moment he
felt the door behind him open.

Then he pulled the trigger of that gun in his pocket in which his
hand had been so lightly resting. The Captain seemed to fire the
same instant, but Billy had jumped aside as he shot his own gun and
he heard the bullet singing past his ear, and now, with his revolver
out of his pocket, he shot again with an aim so true that the other
man's right hand gave a spasmodic jerk and the revolver went
spinning to the ground.

Across the room he hurled himself, springing from the onslaught of
the assailant entering behind him, and thrusting the cursing Captain
from his path he leaped through the sliding panel. The lock clicked
home and he paused even in that moment of hammering pulses and
pounding heart to fumble in the darkness to shut that other panel
into the next room, remembering Fritzi's warning that those locks
needed a key to open them from within. The minute's delay for the
key would mean many minutes for him.

He stumbled against the tiny stairs that led to the tower room
through which Falconer had descended, but he did not dash up those
stairs for he heard the noise of feet overhead, as if returning from
pursuit, and he darted straight on through the long, narrow,
unlighted corridor, running like a hare.

At the other end he crashed against a half-open door and fell
headlong down a flight of stairs. From his astonished fingers the
revolver went clattering and though he picked himself up, battered
but unbroken, at the foot, he dared not waste a minute to go back
and hunt for the gun in the dark. He was totally at a loss for
directions; he had expected to find himself in the Captain's rooms,
and the stairs were unknown. Now he could just make out a door ahead
of him and sent it flying open, smash in the face of an astonished
black boy who went stumbling backwards.

Out went Billy's fist and caught the unguarded chin a staggering
blow, and as the boy reeled back he flung one hurried glance about
the big, lamp-lit chamber in which he found himself, the room
evidently of Captain Kerissen, and darted to an arsenal of weapons
that glinted against the inlaid panels. Wrenching down the shortest
scabbard he jerked out a most villainous looking two-edged knife and
gripping this piratical weapon he bounded out the door, fled through
the dim hall to his right, rounded a corner, to the right again,
hearing the sounds of pursuit louder and louder now behind him, shot
through a vast reception hall and plunged down a flight of stairs.

From the darkness below a figure rose up to receive him with a grip
like iron. Billy's right arm was doubled at his side; the blade of
that villainous old dagger was pressed against the yielding softness
of the fellow's sash, but for the life of him Billy could not drive
home that knife against the human flesh. With a convulsive movement
he tore himself from those gorilla arms and sent up a desperate
kick, then leaped past the staggering man, and with the unused knife
in his teeth, he tore at the bars of the great gate in the wall at
his left. The bars were stiff and primitive and resisted his furious
fingers, and the big gate-keeper, gasping for a moment against the
stairs, suddenly straightened and sprang toward him.

"Here's one hero that didn't open the door 'in the nick of time'!"
raced through Billy's grimly humorous mind, as he dodged the savage
thrust of a knife the man had drawn and turned and scuttled across
the court with the other on his heels. Through the arches he darted
and then down into the garden, sprinting as he had never sprinted
before, on, on to the southwest angles of the wall, thanking Heaven
fervently, as every step outdistanced his pursuer, that the man had
evidently no gun.

The rope ladder was still there, blown free at the bottom now and
waving merrily in the wind. He snatched at it, dropping his knife in
his pocket, praying that the top hooks had not become dislodged, and
after him came the other man, hand over hand. Billy drew up his legs
in a horrid fear of having them gripped or hacked at, and gained the
top just as the other's head appeared below, his knife gleaming in
his teeth.

Like a flash Billy drew out his knife and cut the rope. There was a
wild yell from below and a screech of curses and imprecations
following a rather sickening sounding thud, which persuaded Billy,
peering down from above, that the victim's lungs at least were
unimpaired, and then to his great amazement a shot went winging up
past his ear.

"Had a gun all the time--too fighting mad to think of it--knife more
natural!" he thought amazedly, sliding down the other side in a
jiffy and then jerking his ladder down flat on the ground.

Out in the shadows the one-eyed man was paddling earnestly to
safety. The shot so close at hand had been his sign for departure;
he did not look back at Billy's shrill whistling nor his wilder
shouts, and as the yells on the other side of the wall were bringing
the inmates of the palace upon him, Billy had no more time for
persuasion.

Off went his shoes and out into the canal he flung them, then
headlong he plunged into the dark and uninviting water and struck
out to the right, in the same direction in which the canoe was
going, keeping carefully in the shadow of the bank, on the other
side.

In a few moments the canoe was lost from sight and Billy was left
alone, swimming between two steep walls of old palaces, weighed down
by his tweeds, and maddened through and through with his inability
to wring the neck of the one-eyed canoeist. The distance seemed
unending to his slow progress but at last the palms of the cemetery
appeared upon the right hand bank, and he struck across the widening
waters and climbed out on the first foot of the graveyard that
presented itself.

A dozen rods farther on the Arab was awaiting him in the canoe.
Billy's mood did not invite conversation and he did not linger now
for the other's explanations, but calling to him to wait he made in
through the cemetery, dodging warily from tomb to tomb, till he
reached the entrance of the main road.

The motor was gone. He satisfied himself of that, and a wave of
rejoicing surged through him. That motor was to wait till one or the
other arrived with the girl and then leave with all speed, while the
other was to be left to the slower canoe. He was sure, now, that
Falconer had succeeded in carrying the thing through and Billy's
heart warmed to him. Then, for the first time, he felt something
numb and queer about his left arm and putting his hand on it he
found the sopping sleeve was torn and a warm ooze of blood welling
through the cold water from the canal.

"Gosh, the chap winged me!" was his startled exclamation. "Feels as
if it's going to sleep--glad it didn't go back on me in the ditch,
there." Then he pressed back into the shadows for he saw a figure
edging forward beyond the corner of a tomb. After a moment's
hesitation it came directly toward him. He saw it was Robert
Falconer.

Foreboding gripped him and he could scarcely keep himself from
shouting his eager question, but he hurried forward till the two
stood face to face and then, "Where is she? Did you get her?" burst
from him, and "Have you got her? Is she all right?" came at the same
instant from Falconer.

Blankly they stared at each other and a cold sense of failure went
over and over Billy like a sea. His voice shook with this new,
sickening fear. "Didn't you see her at all?"

"Did you?" counter-demanded Falconer, and Billy stammered, "Why no
I--I found the room empty. And I thought you were safely off with
her."

"Safely off!" said Falconer grimly. "I got in all right, though
there must be a new lock on the door of that room up top, but I made
some noise about it and ran plump into a fellow half way down the
stairs. I threw him the rest of the way down, and he fired and
brought a couple of others swarming up at me but I got out on the
roofs again and gave them the slip. They went tearing back along the
wing toward the garden the way I'd come and I went toward the street
and got down."

"Got down! _How_ did you get down?"

"Over those bay-window places," said the Englishman briefly. "I tied
that cord I had to one of the doddering old cornices to start with.
It wasn't any trick at all."

"Three stories," Billy shot in.

"And you'd no better luck, it seems?" Falconer inquired.

"No, I came up from below and found the room empty--but disheveled,
so I thought you were off with her sure. And just then the Captain
came in the panel places--just back from chasing you along the roof,
I guess, for I'd been hearing the racket--and another fellow with
him and we had a scrimmage and I got away through the men's wing."

"You're wet."

"That was a bit of canal bathing--our Arab put off with the canoe
when I was needing it badly. I left him waiting here all right,
however, and came here to find the motor gone."

"Naturally--being paid in advance."

"Only half paid."

"Half pay was enough for him. I knew it would be.... The thing was
all rot in the first place."

Billy was too bitter of soul to reply. He was remembering what he
ought to have done. He ought to have put that pistol to the
Captain's head and forced him through the palace inch by inch.... He
wondered if it would do any good to go back. His arm was rousing
from its numbness, however, and raising a little racket all its own.

"We might as well get out of this," the Englishman advised, and
Billy's reason acquiesced in spite of his rage. In silence they went
down to the water's edge and embarked. The homeward course, from
caution, was not past the palace but upstream through a remote and
unknown region where they finally landed upon a bank and struck
through unfamiliar and unfriendly looking byways toward the city.

Their walk was silent. Fierce gloom enveloped Billy; furious chagrin
bestrode him. Chump that he was to have jumped at such positive
conclusions! He ought to have stayed there. If only that second Turk
had not been coming up behind him! He could think now of a number of
brilliant ways out of his difficulties.... Morosely he trudged on
through the interminable streets, his chilly wetness like an outward
aspect of his gloom-soused mind.

He could not bear to think of Arlee. He felt now that, warned by
Falconer's approach from above, they had snatched her from her room
and hidden her away. He wondered if he deceived the Captain about
the motives for his presence. He wondered what in the world could be
done now--if all effort was to resolve itself into the futility of
an official search-party. He wondered where in all that baffling
prison Arlee was hidden.

Upon that tormenting question he unlocked his lips. "Where is she?"
he muttered worriedly. "That's the question--where is she?"

"In Alexandria."

Plainly the Englishman's wrath had been smoldering. Billy turned
upon him fiercely.

"In that palace, I tell you."

"So you say."

"And I say, too," and Billy's exasperation strained its bonds, "that
if you don't believe she was there--if you think I got up this
little party to while away an idle evening, why it was most
uncommonly good of you to come! But I can't think why you did it if
you weren't convinced of the necessity. Certainly it was not from
love of me."

"Rather not."

"That goes double.... But you couldn't deny the facts and you _did_
come. Because we failed doesn't change the facts at all. She's
there--only _where_? Had we better go straight to the consul now?"

"I think," said Falconer coldly, "that we had better telegraph the
Evershams to see if they have had any word from her before we stir
up any hue and cry."

"All right," said Billy, and then he gave a short laugh. "Lord, we
shall be quarreling like a couple of backyard dames next ... Of
course, we're chagrined. It's poor satisfaction to reflect that we
did our best--and if you are still uncertain about Miss Beecher's
danger there I can't blame you for seeing the folly of the
business."

After this effort of pleasantness Billy subsided into the cab that
was most welcomely discovered, rousing after some minutes of violent
progress to change their direction to the English doctor's.

"Winged," he said briefly, to Falconer's question. "Watchman chap as
I was getting over the wall. Nothing wrong, I know, but it feels
like--fire," he substituted.

Falconer was instantly concerned, but his sympathy went against the
grain. Billy was too stirred for consolation. At the doctor's he
refused to have Falconer enter with him.

"No use in having both of us traced if there is to be any trouble
about this," he said with decision. "Go ahead and telegraph the
Evershams and get an answer as soon as possible."

He had no earthly belief in that answer, and great, therefore, was
his astonishment when, as he was walking the floor with his tingling
arm in the early morning hours, a telegram was sent to him which
Falconer had just received. His wire had caught the boat at Rhoda
where it tied up for the night and Mrs. Eversham had promptly
answered.

"We have heard from Miss Beecher," she said, "and she may join us
later. Her address just Cook's, Alexandria."




CHAPTER XV

ON THE TRAIL


Breakfasting, a little one-handedly, that Monday morning, Billy was
approached by his companion of the night. The young Englishman
looked fresh and fit and subtly triumphant.

"Good news--what?" he said with a genial smile.

"If authentic," said the dogged Billy.

"Of all the fanatic f----!" The sandy-haired young man checked his
explosiveness in mid-air. He gave a glance at the bulge of bandage
beneath Billy's coat sleeve and dropped into a chair beside him.
"How's the arm?" he inquired in a tone of restraint.

"Fine," said Billy without enthusiasm.

"Glad of that. Afraid the canal bath wouldn't do it any good.
Beastly old place, that." Then the Englishman gave a sudden chuckle.
"It's a regular old lark when you come to think of it!"

"Our lack of luck wasn't any great lark." Savagely Bill speared his
bacon.

"Luck? Why we--Oh, come now, my dear fellow, you can't pretend to
maintain those suspicions now! Of course the letter is authentic!"
Falconer spoke between irritation and raillery. "That Turkish
fellow could hardly fake that letter to them, could he? No, and we
will have to acknowledge ourselves actuated by a too-hasty
suspicion--inevitable under the circumstance--and be grateful that
the uncertainty is over. That's the only way to look at it."

"We don't know that the Evershams have received a 'letter.' It might
be another fraudulent telegram that was sent them from Alexandria."

"That is a bit too thick. You're a Holmes for suspicion!" Falconer
laughed. "I believe if Miss Beecher herself walked into this dining
room you would question if she were not a deceiving effigy!"

"I might question that anyway." Billy's tone was dry. "And I daresay
I am a fool. But that dancer's story is pretty straight if she
didn't know the names, and it fits in disasterously well with my
limousine story."

"You're not the first man to be staggered by a coincidence,"
Falconer told him. "And that woman's yarn was convincing enough,
though all the time I was dubious, you remember. But now that the
Evershams have heard," and the young Englishman's deep note of
relief showed how tormenting had been his uncertainty, "why now we
have no further right to put Miss Beecher's name into the affair.
There is evidently some other girl concerned who may or may not be
as guileless as she represented to the Baroff girl, and I shall lay
that story before the ambassador and leave her rescue to authentic
ways."

He laughed a little shamefacedly at the unauthentic ways of last
night, and added, looking off across the room, "My sister and Lady
Claire are going to Luxor to-night, and I expect to accompany them.
If you should have any word about Miss Beecher's return here I
should be glad if you would let me know."

"If she is safe in Alexandria she'd never think of writing me," said
Billy bluntly. "Our acquaintance is distinctly one-sided."

"I quite understand. She was your countrywoman in a strange land and
all that."

"And all that," Billy echoed. "What time is your train?"

"Six-thirty."

"Then if I don't see you before that here's good luck and good-by."

Billy rose and shook hands and the two young men parted after a few
more words.

"You have an _idée-fixe_--beware of it!" was Falconer's caution,
serious beneath its air of banter, and on the other hand Billy
perceived in the cautioner a latent uneasiness considered so
irrational that he was doing his sensible best to disown it.

So Falconer took himself off about the preparations for departure
and Billy B. Hill was left to face his problem alone. Black worry
plucked at him. He did not know what under the sun he could do next.
Already that day he had done what he could. He had been out early
and run down the one-eyed factotum loitering about the corner and
under cover of a transaction over a scarab he had made a number of
plans.

He wanted the Captain followed every instant of the day. There were
enough active little Arabs greedy for _piastres_ to do that well
and send back constant word to him. There was coming that day, he
felt, an interview between him and that Captain. Then he wanted the
one-eyed man to insinuate himself into the palace. He must find out
things. He could use his connection with the eunuch who was uncle of
his brother's wife.

So much Billy had already arranged and now after a hasty breakfast
he was off to the consul, where he proceeded to unfold his story
while the consul drew little circles on his blotter and looked out
of the corners of his eyes at this astonishing young man.

He made no comment when Billy paused. Perhaps he could think of none
adequate, or perhaps, after all, he had ceased to be amazed. He
merely said slowly and thoughtfully, "Of course the dancer's story
is all you really have to go upon. You had better bring her here."

"Nothing easier," Billy declared, and thinking a cab as prompt as a
telephone he drove briskly off.

The hotel held a shock for him. Fritzi Baroff was gone. She had gone
the evening before, the clerk reported, consulting the register, and
she had paid her bill. As he had not been the one on duty then he
knew nothing more about it. She had left no address.

Ultimately the clerk who had been on duty was unearthed in the
labyrinths of the hotel's backgrounds, but he could supply very
little further except the certainty that she had paid her bill in
person, and the vague belief that she had been accompanied. This
belief was companioned by a hazy notion that some one had called on
her that evening.

Even Billy's sense of humor was unstirred by the half-cynical
sympathy of the night-clerk's gaze; Billy didn't feel a laugh
anywhere within him. He was balked. The dancer had vanished with her
story, and that story was essential to the consul. Like a fool he
must return empty-handed with this yarn of her disappearance and the
consul would be justified in declaring that he had no actual proof
to act upon. Which was precisely what the consul did, but he
offered, impressed with Billy's earnestness, "to take the matter
up," with the proper authorities.

It seemed the best that could be done. Billy urged him to prompt
action, and to himself he promised some prompt action of a totally
unofficial character. He knew now what he was going to do, or rather
he thought he did, for the day still held its unsettling surprises
for him, and as he set forth on business bent that afternoon he
found himself besieged by a skinny little boy in tattered blue
robes, who danced around him with a handful of dirty postcards.

"Be off," said Billy, in vigorous Arabic, and the little boy
answered proudly, in most excellent English, "I am a messenger, sir.
I am the boy who held the canoe that night. Buy a postcard, sir?
Only six piastres a dozen, six piastres, Views of Egypt, the Sphinx,
the Nile, the----"

Impatiently Billy cut him short.

"Never mind the bluff. No one is listening. What's your message?"

"The streets have ears, sir. Buy a postcard?... I have come from the
palace. I brought in the bread. I--_I_ got in under their nose while
the big Mohammed was turned away without sight of his uncle,"
bragged the little Imp. "I am a clever boy, I. No one else so clever
to find out things. The American man did well to come to me."

"What the devil, then, did you find out?"

"Five piastres a dozen, then, only five.... Go on walking, sir, I
will run alongside. Keep shaking your head at me--very good.... I
find out where she are."

"Where _who_ are?"

The little braggart had roused Billy's suspicions. He determined to
be wary.

"The young girl with the very light hair. Mohammed send me to ask of
her. You know, sir," the little fellow insisted, hopping up and down
beside him. "Only four a dozen--very cheap!" he screeched at him in
a tone that must have carried for blocks. "I run in with the bread
and take it to the kitchen where women are working. And I pretend
make love to one very pretty girl, tell her how I come marry her
when I old enough and make enough, and hold up piece money to show
how rich I am. And the rest they think I just make game, but I
whisper to her quick how much you pay her for news of that lady
upstairs with the fair hair, and I give her some money. It are not
much, sir. I promise her to come back with more."

"Go on," demanded Billy, stopping short. "What did she tell you?"

"Walk along, sir, walk along. Just half a dozen then--very cheap,
very beautiful!" cried the little rascal with deep enjoyment of his
rôle. Billy found his hands clenching frenziedly. The Imp proceeded,
"She are much afraid, that girl, to say things, but I tell her how
safe it is an' I tell her you great big rich man who pay her well. I
make her honest promise to come back with money--and she very poor
girl. She whisper quick what she know, looking backward over
shoulder like this." Turning his face about after this dramatic
illustration the Imp caught sight of Billy's countenance, and rolled
the rest of his narration into one speedy sentence.

"She are gone," he cried.

"Gone?"

"Took away.... Take these cards, sir, stop and look at them.... Yes,
she are took away. It happen very quick; early that morning after
the other lady go in the night. Everyone much excited that night,
great noise about, and no one know just what happen. But the Captain
give orders quick, and early the motor car is ready and the strange
girl go away. Old woman go, too. Nobody know where."

"That would be Sunday morning," Billy cried excitedly. "Are you sure
there is no mistake? There were lights in that room on Sunday
night."

"I tell what the girl tell. She are very honest girl," the Imp
insisted. "She say the other lady run away with her lover an'
Captain afraid the new lady has a lover so he send her away quick."

"But he didn't go himself?"

"No, he have something with his reg-reglement," gulped the Imp
hastily, "that day and he stay and he there now--but now he sick."

"What's the matter?"

"I don't know, sir, but I know the doctor comes because she say to
me to come back and say I am boy from doctor with medicine, and if I
don't see her I must say I lost that medicine and go away, and come
again as I can till I bring that money to her. She are very much
afraid, sir."

Billy shuffled the postcards with absent hands and stared down at
them with unseeing eyes. She was gone--and the Captain was not with
her! That much at least was gain. And the fellow was here sick from
his shot hand, apparently. "I hope gangreen sets in," he said
between his teeth.

"You are pleased with me, sir?" the Imp was demanding. "You are glad
of so much clever boy? And you give me that money now to give that
girl? I make her most honest promise--and you see, sir, I am very
honest boy, I tell you all I know and I ask nothing of price yet. I
know that you are honest American man."

At that Billy came out of his brown study and praised the tattered
little Imp with hearty earnestness. He saw no reason to doubt the
boy's story. If he had been trying to invent something in order to
make capital out of him he would hardly have invented that story of
Arlee's departure, for that put an immediate end to further
remunerative investigations in the palace. Of course Billy might be
mistaken, and the boy might be mistaken, but one had to leave
something to probabilities. He was very generous with the boy, and
the droll little brown face was lined with grins. Most naïvely he
besought that the American would not reveal the extent of his
donations to Mohammed, the one-eyed man, as the boys had promised
their employer a just one-half.

It was the first laugh Billy had enjoyed in a long time. His spirits
were vastly lightened by the news that Arlee was out of the palace
where the Captain was staying. Fritzi had optimistically informed
him that the Turk's courtship could be made most lengthy, but that
had been a sadly slender hope and the picture of Arlee playing such
a fearful game was simply horrible to him. So his relief at her
departure was intense, although it complicated more and more the
hope of speedy rescue.

For where was she now? In Cairo? In some of the outlying villages?
He felt swamped by the number of things were to be found out
immediately. He must find where that big gray motor went so early on
Sunday--surely there were people who had remarked it if they could
only be found and induced to talk! And he must find where the
Captain had other homes or palaces where he would be likely to hide
a girl. And he must find out where the Captain was every instant of
the day and night.

That was the most important thing of all. For the Captain unless
delayed by extreme illness, or held back by a caution which Billy
judged was foreign to his nature, would not wait long before he
joined Arlee. He had evidently stayed behind for some review of his
troops and also to be _au courant_ of whatever stir would result
from Fritzi Baroff's reappearance in the world, and be on hand to
disarm whatever further suspicions would result from it. The lights
in the rose room that last night and the used look of the room,
puzzled Billy, but he concluded that the Captain liked the room and
there was a good deal in that palace that had better be left to no
imagination whatever.

So back to the hotel went Billy to enter upon a period of waiting
that frayed his nerves to an utter frazzle. Inaction was horrible to
him, and now it was inevitable. He must wait for word from that
agile web of little spies which the one-eyed man was weaving about
the Captain's palace, and be ready to start whenever the word came.

He slept with his clothes on that Monday night, but he slept heavily
for he was tired and his arm was no longer painful. The tear of
wound he called a scratch was healing swiftly.

Tuesday morning passed in the same maddening suspense. Captain
Kerissen rode out that morning but only to the parade ground, where
he took part in a review with his troops. It was noticed that his
right hand was bandaged, but the injury could not have been severe
for his thumb was free from the bandage and he occasionally used
that hand upon the reins. It was the bright eyes of the Imp that
were sure of that.

In the afternoon the Captain went again to the barracks and then to
the palace of one of the colonels in his regiment. Then he went
home.

Utterly disgusted with this waiting game Billy began to dress for
dinner. All lathered for a shave he stood testing his razor on a
hair when his unlocked door was violently opened and a panting
little figure darted across to him. It was the Imp.

"Sir, he goes, he goes upon the minute," he panted out. "He is in
the station. Quick!"

Like a streak of lathered lightening Billy went for his clothes. A
centipede could have been no more active. He jerked up his
suspenders; he jerked on a shirt; he jerked on a coat; he was wiping
his face as he darted through the halls and down the stairs. No lift
had speed enough for his descent. At the desk he flung some gold
pieces at the clerk, cried something about being called out of the
city, and asked to have his room kept; then he was down the steps
and into the carriage that the Imp had magically summoned.

The drive to the station was a series of escapes. Between jolts the
Imp gasped out the rest of the story. The Captain had ridden out in
the automobile. The Imp had given chase and so had the one-eyed man,
also on guard, and by dint of running for dear life they had kept
the motor in sight until the crowded city streets were reached and a
series of delays enabled them to catch up with it. As soon as they
saw the motor stop before the station the boy had rushed for Billy
while the Arab remained to shadow the Captain and learn his
destination.

They themselves were at the station now, and Billy was still tying
his cravat. Now they jumped down and pressed through the confusion,
dodging dragomans, porters, drivers and hotel runners and making a
vigorous way past hurrying travelers and through bewildered
blockades of tourist parties. Suddenly over the bobbing heads they
saw the face they sought. A single eye glared significance upon
them. An uplifted hand beckoned furiously.

"Assiout," whispered the one-eyed man as Billy reached him.
"Assiout. That one goes to Assiout on the night express."

"My ticket? Got a ticket for me?"

Upturned palms bespoke the absence of ticket and the Arab's deep
regret. "The price was much. I waited----"

Billy was off. There was no chance of his getting past that stolid
guard without a ticket and he charged toward the seller's window,
where a line of natives was forming for another train.

"_Siut_!" he shouted over their heads, and scattering silver and
smiles and apologies he crowded past the motley line to the window
and fairly snatched the miles of green ticket from the Copt's quick
fingers.

He was the last man through the gate, and as he darted through the
clicking of compartment doors was heard with the parting cries of
the guards and the shouts of dragomans and porters. It was a train
_de luxe_ where the sleeping sections had long been reserved, but to
accommodate the crowded travel ordinary compartment cars had been
added at the last minute, and it was at one of these that Billy
grasped, as the wheels were moving faster and faster. A gold piece
caused a guard to unlock the first compartment door, although it
said, "_Dames Seules_," and "Ladies Only" in large letters.

It was not a corridor train and the compartment was already filled,
and as Billy wormed his way, not into the nearest corner, for that
was not yielded to him, but into the modicum of space accorded
between two stout and glaringly grudging matrons, he became aware
from the hostile stares that his entrance had not been solitary.

Between his legs the Imp was coiling.

"I made a sneak with you," the boy whispered. "I say I your
dragoman, sir. You will be glad. You need such bright boy in
Assiout."

Billy thought it highly probable that he would. But the ladies
neither needed nor desired him now, and ringed in by feminine
disgust the two scorned intruders sat silent hour after hour while
the train went rushing south through the increasing darkness of the
night.




CHAPTER XVI

THE HIDDEN GIRL


Hour after hour the little boat held its steady course; hour after
hour the distant banks flowed past in changing scenes. Forward on
the narrow deck a girl sat in a lounge chair beneath a striped
awning and gazed out over the water. Squatting in the shade behind
her an old woman stared up out of half-closed eyes with pupils as
keen and bright under their puckered lids as the eyes of a watching
hawk.

No disturbing consciousness of this incessant scrutiny muffled the
serenity of the girl's appearance. Her hands lax in her lap, her
blue eyes quietly intent upon the view, she lay back in her chair
with as much confident unconcern as she might have shown in an opera
box. As a matter of incredulous fact she was feeling incredulously
at ease.

The terrible tension of those days in the palace was over--for the
time, at least. She did not understand this new move, she had been
bewildered ever since that early dawn, on Sunday, when the old woman
and the eunuch had rushed her into the limousine, driven her
swiftly through the empty streets to a landing place on the river
beyond the bridge, and hurried her on board this little boat, an old
_dahabiyeh_ reconstructed and given a new engine.

The Captain had not appeared except for a brief interview in the
vestibule where he had told her that the quarantine was prolonged
and that he was going to try to escape out of Cairo where the
authorities would not be aware, and would first try to smuggle her
out of the city, too. She must do exactly as the old woman indicated
and everything would be all right.

And she had said, "How exciting!" and "What fun!" with lips that
smiled pluckily in apparent acceptance of this flimsy excuse.

She had connected this flight with the pandemonium she had heard in
the palace the night before, and she guessed that in some way her
presence there had become embarrassing for the Turk. Perhaps her
friends had traced her! Perhaps Robert Falconer--for after all it
would only be Robert Falconer's flouted devotion, she thought, that
would interest itself in her. He mistrusted Kerissen; he would
suspect.

So hope rose high in her, and hopeful, too, was this new glimpse of
freedom. Somewhere, soon, she thought confidently, the chance to
escape would come. The old woman could not watch forever. The big
eunuch was occupied with the boat. She could hear him now muttering
angrily to the little brown boy at the engines, while over the sound
of his muttering rose the rhythmic, unconcerned chant of two other
boys marching up and down the narrow passageways of deck outside the
little staterooms with a scrubbing brush under each left foot.
"_Allah Illeh Lessah_," they chanted monotonously, with a scrub of
the brush at each emphasis. "_Allah Illeh Lessah_."

"Allah help _me_," thought Arlee Beecher.

All day Sunday she had sat there in that chair watching the
pyramids, at first so sharp-cut against the cloudless blue, wane
imperceptibly and fade from sight, watching the golden Mokattan
Hills and the pearly tinted Tura range slip softly from the horizon
and all the old landmarks of the Egypt that she knew disappear and
be replaced by strange, new sights. Other pyramids showed like
child's toys upon the horizon; dense groves of palm trees appeared
along the banks, then the banks grew higher and higher and upon
them, silhouetted against the bright blue sky, showed a frieze-like
procession of country folk driving camels or donkeys or bullocks.

All night long they had steamed, a search-light on the bow, and
Arlee had lain in the little stateroom trying to sleep, but
continually aware of the breathing of the old woman huddled outside
against her door, of the soft thudding of bare feet about the deck,
of the pulse of the engine, beating, beating steadily, and of quick,
muffled commands, of reversals, grinding of chains as some
treacherous shallow appeared ahead, then of the onward drive and the
steady rhythmic progress again.

Where were they taking her? South to some haunt where she would be
farther than ever from the civilization which had flowed so
unheedingly past that old palace of darkened windows, south toward
the strange native cities and tiny villages and the grain fields
and the deserts. But it was all better than that stifling palace and
the absence of the Captain gave her a sense of temporary security.

Sunday had been hot and dry, but this Monday was cooler and the
north wind, blowing freshly over the wide Nile, broke the
amber-brown of the water into little waves of sparkling blue edged
with silver ripples. The river was beautiful to her, even in her
sorry plight, and to-day there were little clouds in the sky,
furtive, scuddy little clouds with wind-teased edges, and they cast
soft shadows over the river and over the tender green of the fields
and the flat, mirroring water standing level in the trenches. In the
fields brown men and women were working, and on the river banks the
half-naked figures of _fellaheen_ were ceaselessly bending,
ceaselessly straightening, as they dipped up the water from the
_shadoufs_ to feed the thirsty land. Sometimes in the fields Arlee
saw the red rusty bulk of the old engines, which the Mad Khedive had
tried to install among his people, to do away with this
back-breaking work, now lying useless and ignored. God forbid that
we do otherwise than our fathers, said the people.

Across the water came the monotonous chant of their labor song, and
sometimes the creak and squeak of some inland well-sweep drawn round
and round by some patient camel. She felt herself to be in another
world, as she sat in that boat guarded by that old woman and an
eunuch, a world strange and remote, yet desperately real as it
enmeshed her in its secret motives, its incalculable forces....

As she watched, as the surface of her mind reflected these sights
and was caught in the maze of fresh impressions, the back of that
mind was forever at work on her own terrifying problem. She thought
confidently of escape, not able to plan it but waiting intently upon
opportunity, upon the passing of a boat perhaps, or the moment of
tying to some bank.

There was in her a high spirit of undaunted pluck and an excitement
in adventure, which made her heart quicken instead of flag at the
odds before her. Only the thought of the desperate stakes and the
reality of her hidden fears would often draw the color from her
cheeks and stop an instant the beating of that hurrying heart.... If
those hawk-like eyes were watching then they might see the slim
hands pressed feverishly together before warning self-control turned
them lax again.

So hour after hour the boat went on. On the left now the long
mountain of Gebel-el-Tayr stretched golden and tawny like a lion of
stone basking in the sun. They passed Beni-Hassan, where a Nile
steamer lay staked to the shore, the passengers streaming gaily out
and starting off on donkeys for an excursion to the tombs. If only
it had been a little nearer, close enough to risk a desperate
hail--! But the very sight of it was comforting.

Toward dusk the engine failed. That night the boat lay by the bank,
tied to long stakes which the boys had driven in. The big Nubian sat
at one end, cross-legged, a rifle on his knees. At the stern sat a
brown boy. And so Arlee sank into the tired sleep that claimed her,
and did not wake until the warm sunshine in her tiny window and the
ripple of water against the sides told her that another morning was
at hand and that they were on the move again.

Stepping out on deck for breakfast, she found the boat was sailing.
Two _lanteen_ sails were hoisted; a great one in the bow, a small
one in the stern, and the boat was running swiftly before the north
wind that blew fresher than ever. But the course was variable now as
the river curved and as sand-banks threatened, and Arlee watched the
waters eagerly for a near-passing boat. But when they did draw close
to a _dahabiyeh_ upon whose deck she saw some white-clad loungers,
the Nubian gave a low order to the old woman who rose and gripped
Arlee on the wrist and led her to the stateroom, sitting in silence
opposite her like a squat gargoyle, till the Nubian's voice
permitted them to emerge.

And now they came to a city upon the right bank and the domes and
minarets, the crowded building and high flat roofs pierced Arlee
with a terrible sense of loneliness. And when her eyes caught the
gleam of flags over a building and she saw her own stars and stripes
blowing against this Egyptian sky, the tears could not be fought
back. With wet eyes and working mouth she stood there and looked and
looked. She thought she could endure no more and that her heart was
breaking.

Leaden discouragement was upon her as the boat made in toward the
shore. It did not approach the city landings; it came in south near
a shallow bank, and one of the brown boys jumped overboard and
splashed to the shore while the boat went on. But by and by it
turned in its course and came beating back against the wind till
opposite it was the city; then it tacked in to that same place near
the bank, and there the boy was waving at them. Skillfully the
_dahabiyeh_ was brought about close to the high bank; and ropes
thrown from bow and stern were quickly staked and made fast.

A plank was put over the side and with the eunuch ahead and the old
woman behind Arlee was taken ashore and mounted on one of the camels
the boys had brought, with the old woman behind, gripping her about
the waist. The eunuch, on another camel, held the bridle rope, and
led them at a terrific pace along the river road and then across the
fields, thudding down the narrow, beaten paths, till the lush green
was past and the dry desert lands began.

Ahead of them a low, tawny mass of mountain seemed to shimmer and
waver in the hot sun, and as they drew nearer and nearer the mass
was resolved into many masses broken into small foothills at the
base, through which the Nubian threaded a rapid, circuitous way that
led out on a rolling ground. A wide detour, still at the same urgent
speed which jolted the breath from the girl and made her cling to
the carpeted pummel of the saddle with both hands, led them at last
within sight of palm trees and mud walls.

Arlee had no means of guessing whether these houses were the
outskirts of that city she had glimpsed or whether they were a
separate village. She only saw that they were being taken to the
largest house of the place, which stood a little apart from the
others and was half-surrounded by mud walls. Into this walled-in
court her camel was led and halted and jerkingly it accomplished
its collapsing descent, and Arlee found herself on her feet again,
quite breathless, but very alert.

Her fleet glance saw a number of black-robed figures about a stair;
the next instant a mantle was flung over her head and that
compelling hand upon her wrist urged her swiftly forward, and up a
flight of steps. Within were more steps and then a door. Thrusting
back the mantle she found herself in the sudden twilight of a small,
low-ceiled chamber. There was no other door to it but the one she
heard bolted behind her; there was one window completely covered
with brown _mashrubiyeh_. She flew to it; it looked out over wide
sands, with a glimpse, toward the right, of a mud wall and pigeon
houses. The room was musty and dusty and dirty; but the rugs in it
were beautiful, and a divan was filled with pillows and hung with
embroidered cotton hangings. Other pillows were on the floor about
the walls. A green silk banner embroidered in gold hung upon one of
those walls and a laquered table stood by the divan.

And as Arlee Beecher stood there in that strange, stifling room, the
mutterings of foreign voices, the squeals of the camels, the bray of
a donkey coming through that screened window, a sudden rage came
over her which was too hot to bear. Her heart burned; her hands
clenched; she could have beaten upon those walls with her helpless
fists and screamed at the top of her unavailing lungs. It was a fury
of despair that seized her, a fury that she fought back with every
breath of sanity within her. Then suddenly the air was black. The
room seemed to swim before her eyes and the ground came swaying
dizzily up to meet her, and receive her spent unconsciousness.

       *       *       *       *       *

Water had been brought; she woke to find herself upon the couch, the
old woman woodenly sopping her head and hands. She smiled weakly
into that strange dark face; it was as unchanged as if it had been
carved from bronze. The business of reviving finished, the old woman
left her a handkerchief damp with a keen scent and went about the
work of unpacking a hamper that she brought in.

Dully, Arlee saw the preparations for a meal advancing. She shook
her head at it; a cup of tea was all that she could touch. A
lethargy had seized her; even the anger of revolt was gone. She
closed her eyes languidly, grateful when the old woman went away,
grateful when the darkness deepened. When it was quite night, she
thought, she would break open the wooden screen and fling herself
through the wood into the sands. She lay there passively waiting;
her heavy eyes closed, and she slept.




CHAPTER XVII

AT BAY


Voices sounded below; footsteps hurried; a door slammed. Then feet
upon the stairs, and a hand at the door. Arlee struggled to her feet
in sudden terror; the candle was out and the room was in darkness.
Outside a gale was blowing. The door opened, but the figure which
hurried in was not the one her fright anticipated.

It was the old woman again, bustling with haste. She brought more
candles for the table, and then a tray with a bottle and glasses and
dishes covered with napkins. Then she bestowed her attention to
Arlee, bringing her a mirror and a comb from the hamper she had left
upon the floor, and a cloth thick with powder. Then Arlee was sure.

She stood rigid a moment, listening to that low buzz of voices from
below, then desperately she shook out her tangled hair and combed it
back from her hot face. It was still damp from the water that had
been dashed upon her, and as she knotted it swiftly, soft strands of
it broke away and hung in wet, childish tendrils. She brushed some
powder on her face; she bit her bloodless lips, and stared into the
glass, to see a wan and big-eyed girl staring back affrighted.

Then the door opened, and desperately calling on her courage, Arlee
heard the Captain speaking her name and saw his smiling face
advancing through the shadows.

"A thousand greetings, Mademoiselle. Ah, I am glad to see you." A
strained emotion quivered through the false assurance of his tone.

She stood very straight and tense before him, a childishly small
figure there in the dusk, the blowing candles making strange play of
light and shadow over her. Steadily she answered, "And I am very
glad to see you, Captain Kerissen."

"And I am glad that you are glad." But his ear had caught the
hardness of her voice, for answering irony was in his. Some devil of
delay and disappointment seemed to enter into him, for his face, as
she saw it now in his advancing, struck fright into her. The four
fingers of his right hand were wrapped in a bandage and he extended
his left to her, murmuring an apology. "A slight accident, you see."

"There is so much I do not see that I do not feel like shaking
hands," gave back Arlee. "Captain Kerissen, this is too strange a
situation to be maintained. You must end it."

"It is a very delightful situation," he returned blandly, looking
about with dancing eyes. "To be again your host, even in so poor a
place as this old house of the Sheik--and the place has its
possibilities, Mademoiselle. It is romantic. Your window overlooks
that desert you were so anxious to see. The sunsets----"

"Captain Kerissen, I must say that you use a very strange way to
keep me your guest!"

"I might respond that any way was justifiable so that it kept you a
guest.... But you wrong me. Did I not bring you safely out from that
quarantine, as you besought me?" His smile was mockery itself.

"But you did not bring me to my friends. I do not like your sending
me here, without explanation," she returned, trying to be very wise
and speak quietly and not rouse him to anger. "We passed a city
where the American flags were flying over a house, and I could have
gone there."

"I am sorry you do not care for my hospitality. I did not know that
I was displeasing to you."

"It is those ways that are displeasing to me. I----"

"Then you shall change them," he laughed. "That will give me
pleasure.... But I did not come in the dead of this night, half sick
and fatigued, to find such welcome. Come, you must smile a little
and sit down at the table with me. Here are delicacies I sent from
Cairo."

Smilingly he seated himself at the divan by the table and lifted the
covers from the plates, nodded satisfaction at the food, and began
to help himself, while she stood there, motionless.

Without looking up, "Will you not help me to the Apollinaris,
Mademoiselle?" he suggested. "My right hand, you see, is not as it
should be. There is a bottle opener on the tray."

Feeling a fool, but unwilling to provoke a crisis, Arlee tugged at
the cork and poured him a glass of the sparkling water and then a
glass for herself, which she thirstily drank. "How did you hurt your
hand?" it occurred to her to say.

"By playing with fire--the single pastime of entertainment!" He
spoke gaily, but his lips twitched. "But will you not sit down and
join me? This caviar I recommend."

"I do not care to eat."

"No?" He finished his sandwich and drained his glass, talking
banteringly the while to her. She did not answer. Something told her
that the time of explanation between them was coming fast; he had
ceased to play with his good fortune, ceased to feel he could afford
to wait and look and fancy. He had come urgent, in the dead of
night. His mood was teasing, mocking, but imperative.... Slowly she
moved toward the unlatched door.

Alertly he was before her; the bolts shot home. "Ah, pardon, but I
was negligent! We might be interrupted--and also," he laughed, as if
deprecatingly, "I have foolish fears that you are so dream-like that
you will vanish like a dream without those earthly bars. Locks are
for treasures.... And now where is that welcome for me? I came in
that door on fire to see you, and your eyes froze me. I came to
love--you made me mock. Shall we begin again? Will you be nice now,
little one, be kind and sweet----"

"Captain Kerissen, you make it impossible for me to like you at all!
Why do you treat me like this? You shut me in this house like a
prisoner. If you--if you care for me at all," stammered Arlee, "you
would not treat me so!"

"And how, then, would I treat you?" he inquired slowly.

"You would--you would take me to my own people and give me back my
independence, my dignity. Then there would be honor in your--your
courtship. I----"

"Would you come back to me?"

"I----"

The lie choked her. And the passion of anger which had flared in her
that afternoon sprang up in flame again; the candlelight showed the
hot blood in her cheeks. "I shall not come to you if you keep me
here!" she gave back fearlessly.

"But here I can come to you. And the preliminaries are always
stupid--I have no desire to reënact them. I am well content with
where we have arrived. Be content, also."

She stared back at his smiling face. And all she thought was, "Shall
I defy him now, or try to hold him off a little longer?" She had
ceased to feel afraid; her blood was on fire; it was battle now
between them; perhaps a battle of the wits a little longer, then----

"In America men do not make love by force," she flung at him. "You
are mad, Captain Kerissen! You will be sorry if you go on like this.
If you wish to marry me you must give me the freedom of choice. You
must give me time. I must have a minister of my own faith. Do you
think I will submit to this? You make me hate you!"

"Hate is often love with a mask," he laughed, his eyes fixed on the
spirited, flushed face, the flashing eyes, the defiant mouth. "And
do not quote your America to me. You are done with America."

"You say that? You forget who I am! My brother--I tell you my
brother will----"

"Do I not know the risks?" His eyes narrowed. "But your brother will
ask in vain. He will not see you--until we reappear as husband and
wife. I will take you to the Continent, then I will give you
everything a woman wants, luxury and jewels--the pearls of my
ancestors I will hang on you. These have no woman of mine worn. You
shall be my adored, my dearest---- Oh, you must not turn from me," he
pleaded, his voice sinking softer and softer as he stole closer to
her. "You know that I am mad for you. You have bewitched me, little
Rose, you have made me strong and weak in a breath. I am clay in
your hands. Be sweet, be kind, be wife to me----" His hot hand
gripped her arm. He bent over her, and she sprang back, her hands
flung out before her.

"Oh, wait!" she cried beseechingly. "Wait--please wait."

"Wait? I have waited too long!" His voice was a snarl now. The mask
of indolent mockery was gone; his face was stamped with cruelty and
greed. "_Nom d'un nom_, I am through with this waiting!"

She sprang back before his approach, then whirled about to face him,
trying to beat him back with words, with reason, with appeal.
Insanely he laughed and clutched at her as she flew past his
outstretched arms; in the corner he pinioned her against the wall
and gripped her to him.

Terror gave her the strength of two--and his hand was bandaged.
Desperately she attacked it, and as his laughter changed to curses,
she wrenched free once more and flew across the room. With both
hands she seized the candles and flung them into the pillowed divan;
holding the last two to the draperies. Like magic the little flames
zigzagged up the cotton hangings.

He threw himself upon the fire, dragging down the hangings, beating
on the cushions, but the corner was ablaze. Overhead the flames
seized cracklingly on the dry wood and darted little red tongues
over the dry surface and a scarlet snake ran out over the carved
ceiling.

In utter wildness Arlee had carried the last candle to the open
hamper and the garments there caught instant fire. She was oblivious
of the sparks falling about her, oblivious of the increasing peril.
When Kerissen ran to the door, tearing open the bolts, furiously
cursing her, she gave him back the ghost of his earlier mocking
laughter and threatened him with a blazing cloth as he turned to
drag her from the room.

But the fire reached her fingers and she flung the cloth at him, to
have him trample it under foot as he sprang toward her again.

"Would you be burned--be marred?" he shouted at her. "You are mad,
you----"

Behind him the door opened. Behind him a tall figure appeared
through the thickening smoke. She saw a face she knew; a voice she
knew cried out her name:

"Arlee!"

"Oh, here!" she cried and flung herself toward him.

"Not unless you want another?" said Billy B. Hill to the Captain,
turning his gun suggestively.

One tense instant the three faced each other in that flaming room,
then with a sound of impotent fury, Kerissen turned and darted out
the door. But as Billy turned to follow, his hand on Arlee's, there
was a sound of sliding bolts.

"Burn, burn, then! Burn together!" called a hoarse voice through the
wood.

Hill flung himself against the door; it was unyielding. On the other
side the taunts continued. He ran to the window, catching up the
little table as he ran, and rained a fury of blows with the table
against the close-carved screen. The wood splintered and broke; he
wrenched a side away, and dropping his gun in his pocket he crashed
through the hole and hung on the outside by his hands.

"Climb out on my shoulders," he commanded, and Arlee climbed--how,
she never knew. For one instant she had an impression of hanging out
over an abyss with fire crackling in her face; the next instant the
soles of her feet were smarting and her eyes still seemed to see
stars.

There was a run, stumbling, with Billy's hand sustaining her, and
then she was on a camel, clutching the saddle as the beast rose
swiftly in response to urgent whacks, and beside her Billy was on
another. Some one on foot goaded the beasts into a startled run, and
behind them yells and screeches were growing louder and louder.

Over her lurching shoulder she had one last glimpse of a burning
building and saw flames pouring from the roof, and the room where
she had been an open furnace, and then she turned her face toward
the dark ahead.

"Hang tight," Billy was calling to her, and she saw him lean over
and lash both camels into furious speed. "Some one is riding after,"
and then he turned and shot his gun warningly into the air.

The yells behind them stopped. But after some moments they heard a
camel snarl, and knew that some one was still back there in the
darkness, hanging on their trail. So they rode hard ahead, into the
enveloping night, over the rolling dunes, with the wind leaping and
tearing and hurling the sand in their faces, as if the very elements
were fighting against them.

It was a strange chase and a hot one, pounding on and on, racked
with the wild, lurching flight, deeper and deeper into the
yellow-gray night that welcomed them with more strident blasts and
more stinging particles of sand.

"It's a storm," Billy shouted at her, raising his voice above the
wind. "It's been blowing up this way for an hour now--they won't
follow long in the face of it. Can you hang on a little longer?"

"Forever," she cried back, gripping the pommel tight and bending her
head before the whirling particles. There was sand in her hair, sand
on her lashes and in her eyes, sand on her face and down her neck,
and sand in her mouth when she wet her lips, but she heard herself
laughing in the night.

"By and by we'll get off," he called back, and by and by when the
hot, stifling, stinging, choking, whirling gale was too blinding to
be borne, he checked the camels in one of the hollows of the desert
dunes from which the wind was skimming ammunition for its peppery
assaults, and the beasts knelt with a haste that spoke of gladness.

"It's the backbone of it now; cover your head and lie down," Billy
commanded, and Arlee covered it with what he thrust into her
hands--his overcoat, she found--and tucked herself down against him
as he crouched beside the camels.

"I should think--it was--the backbone," she gasped, unheard, into
her muffling coat. For the wind howled now like a rampaging demon;
it tore at them in hot anger; it dragged at the coat about her head,
and when her clutch resisted, it flung the sand over and over her
till she lay half buried and choking. And then, very slowly and
sulkily, it retreated, blowing fainter and fainter, but slipping
back for a last spiteful gust whenever she thought it finally gone,
but at last her head came out from its burrow, and she began
cautiously to wipe the sand crust off her face and lashes.

"In your eyes?" said a sympathetic voice.

In the darkness beside her Billy Hill was sitting up, digging at his
countenance.

"Not now--I've cried--that all gone," she panted back.

He chuckled. "I'll try it--swearing's no use."

She sat up suddenly. "Are they coming?"

"Not a bit. No use, if they did. You're safe now."

"Oh, my _soul_!" She drew a long, long breath. "I can't believe
it." Then she whirled about on him. "How--why--why is it _you_?"

He looked suddenly embarrassed, but the darkness hid it from her. He
became oddly intent on brushing his clothes. "Oh, I guessed," he
said in a casual tone.

"You guessed? Don't they know? What did they think? Oh, where did
everyone think I was?"

He told her, dwelling upon the misleading details; the hasty message
of farewell from the station, the directions about luggage, the
money to pay the hotel bill. "You see, his wits and luck were just
playing together," he said.

"Then the Evershams _are_ up the Nile?"

"Of course. They never dreamed----"

"They wouldn't." Arlee was silent. She wondered confusedly--she
wanted to ask a question--she wanted to ask two questions.

"But--but--no one else----?" she stammered.

There was a particularly large lump of sand in Billy B. Hill's
throat just then; he cleared it heavily. "Oh, yes, some one else
guessed, too," he said then. "That English friend of yours, Robert
Falconer, he and I had a regular old shooting party in the palace
last Sunday evening. If you'd been there then he would certainly
have had you out."

"So he knows." She said it a little faintly, Billy thought, as if
she was disappointed and troubled. She would know, of course, by
intuition, how the Englishman would think about a scrape of that
sort.

"But he doesn't know now," he said eagerly. "He is sure you are all
right in Alexandria, because the Evershams received another fake
telegram from you from Alexandria. The Captain was stalling them
along, apparently, keeping everything under cover as long as
possible. And when Falconer heard about that, his suspicions were
over. He thought we'd made fools of ourselves in going to the
palace."

She was silent. Looking at her, after a while, Billy saw her staring
out obliviously into the darkness; her hair was hanging all about
her.

His glance seemed to recall her thoughts. She started and then
brushed back her hair; the sand fell from it and she took hold of
one soft strand. "Look out, I'm going to shake this!" she warned,
and he half shut his eyes and underneath the lids he saw her shaking
her head as vigorously as a little terrier after a bath.

"Isn't it awful?" she appealed.

"I could scratch a match on my face," he confirmed.

"But tell me," she began again, "how did you know I was in that
palace? And I must tell you how I happened to go and how I was kept
there."

"You were told there was a quarantine, weren't you?" Billy supplied,
as she hesitated.

Her astonishment found quick speech. "Why, how did you know _that_?"

"The Baroff told me--that Viennese girl who came into your room."

"Why, you know _everything_! How did you?"

"Oh, I carried her over a wall, thinking it was you."

"But how could you think it was _I_? And what were you doing at the
wall? I don't see how----"

"Oh, one of the palace maids gave me a message in Arabic and I
thought it was from you. You see, I suspected--I had seen you drive
off in that motor----"

"But how could the maid bring you a message? Where were you? Where
did she see you?"

"I was painting out in front of the palace." Billy sounded more and
more casual.

"You said you were an engineer," said Arlee. His heart jumped. At
least she had remembered that!

"So I am--the painting was just a joke."

"And you happened there," she began, wondering, and after he had
opened his mouth to correct her, he closed it silently again.
Gratitude was an unwieldy bond. He did not want to burden her with
obligation. And he suspected, with a rankling sort of pang, that he
was not the rescuer she had expected. So he made as light as
possible of his entrance into the affair, telling her nothing at all
of his first uneasiness and his interview with the one-eyed man
which had confirmed his suspicions against the Captain's character,
and the masquerade he had adopted so he could hang about the palace.
Instead he let her think him there by chance; he ascribed the
delivery of Fritzi's message to sheer miracle, and his presence
under the walls that night to wanton adventure, with only a
half-thought that she was involved.

Stoutly he dwelt upon Falconer's part in the attack the next night,
and upon the entire reasonableness of his abandonment of the trail.
He put it down to his own mulishness that he had hung on and had
learned through the little boy of her removal from the palace.

He interrupted himself then with questions, and she told him of her
strange trip down the Nile in the _dahabiyeh_, under guard of the
old woman and the Nubian. "But how did you come?" she demanded.

"Well, I just swung on to the same train he was in," said Billy.
"And I got out at Assiout because he'd bought a ticket there, but I
couldn't see a thing of him in the darkness and confusion of the
station, and I had a horrid feeling that he'd gone somewhere else,
the Lord knew where, to you. But the Imp--that's the little Arab boy
who adopted me and my cause--went racing up and down, and he got a
glimpse of the Captain tearing off on a horse and behind him a man
loping along with a bundle on a donkey, and the Imp raced behind him
and yelled he'd dropped something. The man went back to look, and
the Imp ran alongside him, asking him for work as a donkey boy. The
fellow shook him off, but that had delayed him, and though we lost
the horseman we kept the donkey-man in sight and followed him on to
the village. I reconnoitered while the Imp stole these two
camels--jolly good ones they are--and while I was trying to make out
where you were, for there were lights in several windows, I suddenly
heard your voice and then I saw a glare of fire. Well, my revolver
was a passport.... Now, how about that fire? What started it?"

"I did; he--he was trying to make love to me," she answered
breathlessly, "and I just got to the candles."

"Are you burned at all? Truthfully now? I never stopped to ask."

"If I am, I don't know it," she laughed tremulously. Then, "Isn't
this _crazy_!" she burst forth with.

"It's--it's off the beaten track," Billy B. Hill admitted. "It's a
jump back into the Middle Ages." His note of laughter joined hers as
they sat staring owlishly at each other through the dark of the
after-storm.

A little longer they talked, their questions and answers flitting
back and forth over those six strange days; then, as the excitement
waned, Billy heard a sleepy little sigh and saw a small hand
covering a yawn. The girl's slender shoulders were wilting with
incalculable fatigue.

Instantly he commanded sleep, and obediently she curled down into
the little nest he prepared, pillowing her head upon his coat, and
almost instantly he heard her rhythmic breathing, slow and unhurried
as a little child. His heart swelled with a feeling for which he had
no name, as he sat there, his back against a camel, staring out into
the night, an unknown feeling in which joy was very deep and triumph
was merged into a holy thankfulness.




CHAPTER XVIII

DESERT MAGIC


He had meant but forty winks, but it had been dark when his eyes
closed and he opened them to the unreal half-lights of early dawn.
The sky was pearl; the sands were fawn-colored; the crest of a low
hill to the east shone as if it were living gold, and the next
instant it seemed as if a fire were kindled upon it. It was the sun
surging up into the heavens, and great waves of color, like a sea of
flame, mounted higher and higher with it.

Impulsively Billy bent over the little figure sleeping so soundly at
his side, speaking her name gently. And Arlee, waking with a start
and a catch of her breath that went to his heart, opened her eyes on
a wild splendor of morning that seemed the outer aspect of the
radiant joy within her.

They looked and looked while the east flamed like a burning Rome,
and then the glow softened and paled and dissolved in mysteries and
miracles of color, in tender rose and exquisite shell pinks, in
amethysts and violets and limpid, delicate, fair greens. All about
them the sands were turning to gold, and the rim of the distant
horizon grew clearer and clearer against the brightening blue of the
sky, like a great circling tawny sea lapping on every side the arch
of the heavens.

As they looked their hearts stirred and quickened with that
incommunicable thrill of the desert, and their eyes turned and
sought each other in silence. The gold of the sun was on Arlee's
hanging hair and the morning-blue of the sky in her eyes; her face
was flushed from sleep and a tiny tendril still clung to the pink
cheek on which she had been sleeping. Somehow that inconsequent
small tendril roused in Billy a thrill of absurd tenderness and
delight.... She was so very small and childish, sitting there in the
Libyan desert with him, looking up at him with such adorable
simplicity.... In her eyes he seemed to see something of the wonder
and the joy in his. It was a moment of magic. It brought a lump into
his throat.... He wanted to bend over her reverently, to lift a
strand of that shining hair to his lips, to touch the sandy little
hands....

Somehow he managed not to. The moment of longing and of glamor
passed.

"It's exactly as if we'd been shipwrecked!" said Arlee, looking
about with an air of childish delight.

"On a very large island," he smiled back, and felt a furtive pain
mingling with his joy. He was just her rescuer to her, of course;
she accepted him simply as a heaven-dropped deliverer; her thoughts
had not been going out to him in those long days as his had gone to
her.... Decisively he jumped to his feet and said breakfast. Where
was it? What was to be done?

Directions were vague. They had come south on the edge of the
desert, and the Nile lay somewhere to the east of them, and to the
east, therefore lay breakfast and trains and telegraph lines and all
the outposts of civilization.

To the east they rode then, straight toward the tinted dawn, and as
they went they laughed out at each other on their strange mounts
like two children on a holiday. Their spirits lifted with the beauty
of the morning, and with that strange primitive exhilaration of the
desert, that wild joy in vast, lonely reaches, in far horizons and
illimitable space. The air intoxicated them; the leaping light and
the free winds fired them, and with laughing shouts and challenges
they urged their camels forward in a wild race that sent the desert
hares scattering to right and left. Like runaways they tore over the
level wastes and through the rolling dunes, and at last, spent and
breathless, they pulled back into a walk their excited beasts that
squealed and tossed their tasseled heads.

Their eyes met in a gaiety of the spirit that no words could
express. When Arlee spoke she merely cried out, "I've read the camel
had four paces, but mine has forty-four," and Billy gave back, "And
forty-three are sudden death!" and their ringing laughter made a
worried little jackal draw back his cautious nose into his rocky
lair.

They were in broken ground now, more and more rocky, leading through
the low hills ahead of them, and great clumps of grayish _mit minan_
and bright green hyssop dotted the amber of the sands. Here and
there the fork-like helga showed its purple blossom, and sometimes
a scarlet ice-plant gleamed at them from a rocky crack. Across their
path two great butterflies strayed, as gold and jeweled as the day.
High overhead, black against the stainless blue, hung a far hawk.

At last the way entered a narrow defile among the rocky hills, and a
sharp curve led them finally out upon the other side, looking down
into green fields, as straight and trim as a checker board in their
varying tints, and off over the far Nile. The fertile lands were
wide here, and fed with broad canals that offered the surprise of
boats' white wings between the fields of grain. Not far ahead,
before the desert sands reached that magic green rose a group of
palms, and near them some mud houses and a pigeon tower.

"Breakfast," said Billy triumphantly, and gaily they rode down on
the sleeping village.

       *       *       *       *       *

Back toward the Libyan hills runs the canal El-Souhagich, and as it
curves to the north a reach of sand sweeps down from the higher
ground, interrupting the succession of green fields. Several jagged
rocks have tumbled from the limestone plateaus above and increased
the grateful bit of shade which the half dozen picturesque palms do
not sufficiently bestow.

Here the runaways breakfasted upon the roast pigeon, dates and
tangerines they had bought from the curious villagers, and here
Billy, his back against a rock, was smoking a meditative cigar over
the situation. Beside him, tied to a palm, knelt the camels, and
before him, nibbling a last tangerine, Arlee was sitting.

"We have to rest the beasts a bit." This from Billy, suggestive of
a conscience pricking at this holiday delay. "And then----"

"Then--?" echoed Arlee cheerfully.

"Then, what in the world am I going to do with you?"

"With me?"

"Yes. It's simple enough, I suppose, getting back to the city---but
if you don't want your friends to know----"

The quick shadow in her eyes distressed him. "I _don't_," she cried
sharply. "At first--I might have made a lark out of it--but
afterwards.... No, I don't want to go explaining and explaining
forever and ever. Can't I just reappear?"

"You can reappear from Alexandria," he said. "He, himself," his tone
changed as he reluctantly brought Kerissen into the beauty of that
morning, "has arranged it very neatly for you. You can just have
been camping in the desert--and true enough that is!--with those
friends of yours whom the Evershams don't know. Only your
reappearance has to be--managed a bit."

Very carefully she tore the tangerine skin into very little bits,
her head bent over it. Then she flung the fragments far from her
with a gesture of rebellion. "I hate fibs," she said explosively.
And then, "But I hate explanations more!" She hesitated, stealing a
quick glance under her lashes at his frowning face.

"And some people," she stammered, "might--might
not--understand--they would feel that--some people would----"

"Some people are great fools, undoubtedly," Billy promptly agreed.
But back of the some people he saw Falconer in her mind, and
Falconer's instinctive distaste of all strangeness and sensation.

"I have a perfect right to keep it from--them," she went on
argumentatively, and then with an upward glance, "Haven't I?"

"Good Lord, yes! It was your adventure; it doesn't concern another
soul in this wide world."

"You know," said Arlee, locking and unlocking her fingers, "you
know, some people wouldn't take it all for granted the way--you
do.... And it was very horrid."

"It's over," said he crisply, "except I'd like to pound him to a
jelly."

"I couldn't bear to _speak_ of him before," said the girl, "but now
it seems all far away and nightmarish.... And I'd like to tell you
how it was--a little."

"You needn't."

"I know I needn't." Arlee's tone was suddenly proud. Then she melted
again. "But I want you to know. He was--he was trying to make me
care for him.... He wasn't really as dreadful as you might think
him, only just insane--about me--and utterly unscrupulous. But he
did want me to like him and so, when I found out, when Fritzi told
me I was in a trap, I tried to play his game. I _flirted_ one day in
the garden, at lunch, and made him think---- You see, I _had_ to gain
time and try to get word to people. But I hated him so I----" She
broke off, the pupils of her fixed eyes big and black with the
memory.

"You know I can't--I can't think of you--alone there," came huskily
from the young man.

"He never _dared_ to touch me--really--till last night," she said
fiercely. "He tried, but I--I held him off. Only he talked to
me--Oh, how he talked. Like a river of words.... I hate all those
words.... If ever again a man asks me to marry him I don't ever want
him to _talk_ about it. I want him just to say two words, _Will
you?_" Her laugh caught quiveringly in her throat.

It taxed all the young man's control to keep his tongue off the
echo.

"He just raved," she went on after a pause, "and I had to
listen--but last night he was horrible. I could never have got to
the candles if his hand hadn't been hurt."

"I wish I'd shot his hand off," said Billy bitterly.

"Oh! Was it you who----?"

"When we were in the palace." He told her again about the raid and
she nodded delightedly over it.

"It's so wonderful for you to have done all this," she said with
sudden shyness. "You had just met me----"

The things on Billy's tongue wouldn't do at all. None of them. What
he did say was absurdly stiff and constrained. "You were my
countrywoman--and alone."

"So are the Evershams," said Arlee, with sudden bubbling laughter,
and then as suddenly checked herself. Her fleet glance at him was
half-scared. "You--you are very good to your countrywomen in
distress," she got out stammeringly.

Billy contemplated his cigar. It was safer.

Presently she reverted to the topic of discovery. "But about Mr.
Falconer? Are you sure his suspicions are over now?"

"Perfectly sure. Or they will be the moment he sees you. You'll have
to laugh at him if he mentions them, of course;" Billy spoke with
heartiness.

"He'd hate it," the girl said musingly. "The talk and all--about
me--Oh, after being such a fool _I'd never be the same to them_!"
she broke out passionately.

The furtive pain was bolder now; Billy felt it worming deeper and
deeper into his sorry consciousness. It mattered so much to her what
Falconer thought--so much....

"But I'll do anything you say," she said meekly, looking up at her
rescuer with those big eyes whose blueness always startled him like
unsuspected lakes. He saw then that she meant to be very grateful to
him. Somehow that deepened the pang. He didn't want that kind of
bond....

"Then you will bury even the memory of this time and never whisper a
word of it," he told her stoutly. "The talk and explanation will be
over five minutes after your return. The thing is, to manage that
return. Now the Evershams left Friday and this is Wednesday--six
days."

"Only six days," she echoed with a ghost of a sigh.

"Now let me see where were we on the sixth day? When I was on the
Nile?" He knitted his brows over it. "Why, the steamer leaves
Assiout at noon of the fifth day--that was yesterday."

"Oh! I must have passed them on the Nile," cried Arlee.

"Maragha is where they stopped last night. To-day they'll be
steaming along steadily and stop to-night at Desneh. To-morrow night
they'll be at Luxor."

"And they stay three days at Luxor?"

"The steamer does, I believe. I left the steamer there and went to
the hotel for a while and spent another while at Thebes with a
friend of mine."

"The excavator!" cried Arlee quickly.

"Then you do remember," said Billy with a direct look, "that dance
and----"

"And our talk," she finished gaily. "And your being Phi Beta Kappa.
Oh, I was properly impressed! And I didn't know then that you were a
regular Sherlock Holmes as well."

"I didn't know it either," said Billy grinning. But he knew that she
didn't know now how much of a Sherlock Holmes he had managed to be
for her.

"That seems ages ago," she declared, "and in an altogether different
world. The only real world seems to be this desert----"

"Bedouin breakfast and camel races," finished Billy. "And it's so
much of a lark for me that I can't keep my mind on the problem of
the future. But I have to get you to Luxor by to-morrow night----"

"And I can't arrive in the rags and tatters of a white silk calling
gown," mentioned Arlee cheerfully, surveying her disreputable and
most delightful disarray. "I must have trunks and a respectable
air--and a chaperon, I suppose."

"And I won't do at that. But if you get to Luxor you'll be all
right. You can go to the hotel and to-morrow night the Evershams'
boat will get in about seven in the evening."

"Did you say my trunks were sent to Cook's?"

He repeated the story of the telegram to the Evershams. Over the
arrival of the boy with money for her hotel bill she wrinkled her
brows in perplexity. "I suppose he thought there would be less
discussion about me if my bills were paid," she said finally. "But
I'd like to get that money back to him."

"I'll see he gets it--with interest," responded Billy.

"And you----?" She looked up at him with a startled, vivid blush
that stained her soft skin from throat to brow. "You must have been
to a great deal of expense----"

"Not a bit. Please don't----"

"But I must. When I get to a bank. I still have my letter of credit
with me," she said thankfully, "but it didn't do me any good in that
wretched palace. It was just paper to them. I showed it to the girl
once and tried to make her understand."

"The first station we find we'd better wire for your trunks to be
sent by express to Cook's at Luxor--or to the Grand Hotel. And then
you can take the train straight to Luxor and buy some clothes
there."

"But the train--I can't travel in this! And there would be people on
it who would talk----"

"Had we better make it to Assiout then?" said Billy doubtfully.
"Once in the city, of course, you'd be safe----"

"How far is Assiout from Luxor? Where are we now?"

"We're Alice in Wonderland about that. Somewhere about twenty-five
or thirty miles south of Assiout, I should say. It must be
nearly a hundred and twenty, as the crow flies, from Assiout to
Thebes--that's right across from Luxor, you know."

Arlee was silent a moment. She lifted a handful of shining sands and
let them run down from her fingers in fine dust. "It's such a pity,"
she mused, "when we've such a good start----"

Billy stared.

"And I never rode a camel," she went on. "I may never have such a
chance again."

"You don't mean----?"

"It would make my story a little truer, too.... And wouldn't it be
quicker?"

"Quicker? The quickest way is to go back to Assiout and catch the
middle-of-the-night express there and get to Luxor to-morrow
morning."

Arlee sighed. "I always wanted to be a gypsy," she murmured
regretfully, "and now I've begun it's such a pity to stop.... And
I'm _afraid_ to go back!" she cried, "They will be out looking for
us--they are probably now on the way. And they'll shoot at you and
carry me off--Oh, do let's go on! Don't go back to that city! We can
catch the train another place. Oh, it's so much more _sensible_!"

"Sensible?" Billy repeated as if hypnotized.

"Why, of course it is. And safer. For all those people back there
must be in that tribe of the sheik whose house I was in, and they
are dangerous, dangerous. I want to get as far away from them as
possible. I'd rather ride all the way to Thebes than run the risk
of falling in their traps."

Billy was silent.

"And I'm sure the camels could make the trip in a couple of days,"
she continued, sounding assured now, and pleasantly argumentative.
"I used to read about their speed in my First Reader.... That is, if
you don't mind the trouble," she added apologetically, "and being
with me that day more?"

Billy choked. She looked entirely unconscious, and his dumfounded
gaze fell blankly away. "There isn't anything in the world I'd like
better," he said slowly, sounding reluctance in the effort not to
sound anything else, "but from your point of view--if we should
meet----"

"Only _fellaheen_ on the banks," she returned unconcernedly. "Not
half as awkward as people on trains."

"But the--the chaperonless aspect of this picnic----?"

"Oh, _that_!" She was mildly scornful. Then she giggled. "I think a
chaperon would look very silly tagging along behind on a camel....
Besides we've gone so far already. You took the liberty of rescuing
me, you know, and then the sand storm and this breakfast _à
deux_--What's a few meals more?"

There was truth in that--and truth in what she said about the danger
of returning to the city. They were already lingering overlong and
Billy jumped up and packed their supply of food in sudden haste. It
was folly, of course, to dream of the entire trip to Thebes on
camelback, but Girgeh was about fifty miles south, and it would be
safer and almost as near to push on there or to the next town,
wherever that was, and there get the train as to return to
Assiout....

Oh, Billy, Billy! What specious argument! And why must every bright
delightful fruit be forbidden by dull care or justified by
flagrantly untenable artifice? Who but a fool would boggle over this
chance, this gloriously deserved crown of the adventure, this gay,
random ride over the deserts with Arlee?... To her it was nothing
but a prolonging of the lark into which the affair had miraculously
been turned. Billy was Big Brother--the American Big Brother with
whom one might go safely adventuring for a day or a year.... And
suddenly Billy felt a warm gladness within him. Not even her
escapade with the unspeakable Turk had been able to shake her dear
faith in her own countrymen.... He was not man to her; he was
American. Billy waved the flag loyally in his grateful thoughts.

Aloud he said, "There's risk in trying to go back, of course. That's
what they're expecting of us. But there will be uncertainty in going
on----"

"I rather like it. It's the certainty that frightens," she gave back
eagerly. "I want the way that puts the greatest distance between me
and that man.... I don't care what else happens so he doesn't find
us."

       *       *       *       *       *

It is utterly astonishing how unastonishing the most astonishing
situations become at the slightest wont.

Nothing on the face of it could have been more preposterous to Billy
B. Hill's imagination than trotting along the banks of the Nile on
a camel with a gossamer-haired girl trotting beside him, two lone
strays in a dark-skinned land, and yet after a few hours of it, it
was the most natural thing in the world!

It was all color and light and vivid, unforgettable impressions. It
was all sparkle and gaiety and charm. They were two children in a
world of enchantment. Nothing could have been more fantastic than
that day.

Sometimes they rode low on paths between green _dhurra_ fields,
sometimes they rode high along the Nile embankment, watching the
blue waters alive with winged fleet, black buffaloes splashing in
shallows under charge of little bronze babies of boys, watching all
the scenes about them shift and change with magic mutability.

They lunched beside an old well, they dined by the river bank, and
then as the velvet shadows deepened in the folds of the Arabian
mountains across the river and the first stars pricked through the
lilac sky above them, they pressed on hurriedly into the southwest
that glowed like molten gold behind the black bars of the palms....
And by and by when even the after-glow had ceased to incarnadine the
far horizon and the path was too black and strange for them, they
turned off across the fertile valley into the edging desert again
and saw the new moon rise like an arrow of fire over the rim of the
world and pour forth a golden flood that lightened the way yet
farther south for their tired beasts.

Arlee rode like a fairy princess of mystery, the silver shawl which
they had bought at a village to shield her from the sun, drooping in
heavy folds from her head, its metal threads glimmering in the moon
rays.... Her eyes were solemn with the beauty and the wonder, of
the night, and the strange solitude and isolation; her look was
ethereal to Billy and mystically lovely.

But Girgeh seemed to retreat farther and farther into the unknown
south, and at last it was no fairy princess but only a very tired
girl who slid stiffly down from the saddle, and pillowed a heavy
head on Billy's coat. And it was a very tired young man who lay
beside her, listening to the deep breathing of the beasts and the
faint breath that rose rhythmically beside him. Yet for a time he
did not sleep. His heart was full of the awe and mystery of the
moonlit world about him--and the awe and mystery of that little bit
of the living world curled there so intimately in the dark....

With a reverent hand he drew the wraps he had purchased closer over
her. The night was growing cold. Far off the jackals howled.... With
his gun at hand he slept at last, and slept sound, though sand is
the hardest mattress in the world and a camel's back not the softest
pillow....




CHAPTER XIX

THE PURSUIT


"But I shall die," said Arlee. "I shall simply die if I have to go
another step upon that creature."

She said it cheerfully, but firmly, a sleepy, sunburned little
nomad, sitting cross-legged in the sands, slowly plaiting her
honey-colored hair. "Even this," she announced, indicating the
slight gesture of braiding, "is agony."

"It's the morning after," said Billy, testing his shoulder with wry
grimaces. "It's yesterday's speed--and then this infernally cold
night. No wonder we're lame. Why, I have one universal crick
wherever I used to have muscles. But let me call your attention to
the fact that we are in the wilds of Egypt and that tangerines are
hardly a lasting breakfast. Something has to be done."

"Not upon camels," said Arlee fixedly.

"They say it doesn't hurt after an hour or so more."

"I shouldn't live to find out."

"A walk," he suggested, "a slow, swaying, gently undulating
walk----?"

"A long, lingering, agonizing death," the young lady translated.
She tossed the curly end of her braid over her shoulder and rose,
with sounds of lamentation. "I ought to have known better than to
sit down again when I was once up," she confided sadly.

"Just what," inquired her companion, "is your idea for the day? How
do you expect to reach Girgeh? It can't be very far away now----"

"Then we'll walk--_we'll_ walk," she emphasized, "and tow those
ships of the desert after us. That will be bad enough, but
better--_what's that?_"

Like a top, for all his stiffness, Billy spun about to stare where
her finger pointed. Over the crest of a hillock, far to the
north--yes, something was hurrying their way.

"A man on horseback," said Arlee anxiously. "They can't have traced
us, can they, all this way----?"

"Of course not--but we'll take no chances," returned Billy briskly;
"no more talk of pedestrian tours now!" and promptly he helped the
girl, no longer demurring, into the saddle, and thwacked her camel
into arising, just dodging the long, yellow teeth that the resentful
beast tried to fasten upon his shoulder.

They started at no soothing walk, but at a hurrying trot.

Worriedly, her delicate brows knitting, "It's absurd, but," said
Arlee, "they could have traced us, I suppose, from my telegraphing
at that little native station for my trunks to be sent."

"And mine," said Billy. "And from my trying to get my letter of
credit cashed."

"That Captain could have telegraphed to all the places down the
line to know if we'd been seen----"

"Even if we hadn't wired or tried to get money, our presence alone
and our buying food would have aroused talk. I told everybody," the
young man continued, "that I was an artist and you were my sister,
and that passed all right--but if Kerissen has been making
inquiries----"

"I'm desperately glad we didn't go back toward Assiout," she thrust
in. "We'd have walked right into some trap of his!"

"Lord knows what we ought to have done! Lord knows what we ought to
do now!"

"Just keep on going," she encouraged. "We can't be very far from
Girgeh, can we?"

"I don't know," said Billy soberly. "It may be half a day or a whole
day more--you remember how vague that old woman was last night...!"
Bitterly he added, "And I'm afraid you've got a chump of a guide."

"I've the best one in the world!" she flashed indignantly.

But her assurance brought no solace to the young man's troubled
soul. He reflected that they could have taken a train the day
before. To be sure, he had not money enough for tickets to Luxor,
yet he had enough for two to Girgeh. But Arlee had shrunk from
entering a train in her dishevelled costume, fearful of watching
eyes and gossiping tongues, and had advised riding on to Girgeh,
where shops and banks would help them, and he had yielded apparently
to her desires, but in reality to his own secret self that clung to
every joyful contraband moment of this magic time with her.
Sincerely he had thought their danger ended.... But those trailing
horsemen--"_Brute!_" he raged dumbly at himself. "Dolt! Idiot!"

Anxiously Billy looked at Arlee. It was an ordeal of a ride.

They had ridden on in silence, occasionally glancing back over their
shoulders. At last Arlee said, quietly, "Do you see anything--over
there--to the left?"

Billy had been seeing it for fifteen minutes.

"Another horseman, isn't it?" he carelessly suggested.

"He seems to be riding the same way we are."

"Well, we've no monopoly of travel in this region."

She answered, after a moment, "There's another close behind him. I
just saw him on top of a little hill. I suppose they can see us?"

"Probably." Billy's face was grave. If they continued their winding
path in from the desert to the intervening hills that shut them from
the Nile valley, and the horsemen continued their course along the
base of those hills, they would soon meet.

"Do you mind speeding up a little?" he asked. "I'd rather like to
cross to the Nile ahead of that gentry."

But as they speeded up the pursuers did the same, and from mere dots
they grew to tiny figures, clearly discernible, furiously galloping
over the sands.

Billy thought hard about his cartridges, wishing he had more in his
clothes. When he had left the hotel that Tuesday evening he had
thrust the loaded revolver in his pocket, but he had already
discharged it twice at the beginning of their flight.... And then he
startlingly reflected that the Captain could easily cause their
arrest for stealing those camels, and wild and dreadful thoughts of
native jails and mixed tribunals darted into his harassed and
anxious mind. As a long ridge of sand intervened between them and
their pursuers he made a sudden decision.

"Let's turn off," he said quickly, and from the little winding path,
edging southeast, they struck directly south over the trackless
sand.

"You see, they'll expect us to make a railroad station as soon as
possible," he explained, "and they are probably trying to nab us on
the way to it--if those men have anything to do with us at all." He
said nothing about his vivid fear of arrest for the camels and the
tool such an arrest would be for Kerissen's designs. He merely
added, "I think we'd better try to give them the slip and steer
clear of all the little native joints until we get to Girgeh, which
is big enough to give us some protection. There must be an English
something-or-other there.... I really think we ought to go as fast
as we can now, and when the way is clear, hurry across the hills
into the Nile valley."

But the way did not become clear. Disconcerted by that unexpected
dash off the path, and reduced for a time to mere dots again, the
horsemen, three in a row now, hung persistently upon their left
flank, keeping a parallel course between them and the hills.

The day had dawned with a promise of sultry heat, and as the sun
rose higher and higher in the heavens the heat grew more and more
intolerable to their ill-protected heads and thirsty tongues. The
gaiety of yesterday was gone; the enchantment had vanished from the
waste spaces, and the desert was less a friend now than an enemy.
Chokingly the dust rose about them, and glaringly the gold of the
burning sands beat back the glare of the down-pouring sun. From such
a heat the landscape seemed to shrink and veiled itself with a faint
and swimming haze.

By noon the flask of water in Billy's pocket was empty. By noon
their mouths were parched and their skins burning. And still on
their left there hung the hounding dots, like prowling jackals.

Anxiously Billy looked at Arlee. This was an ordeal of a ride that
tried the stuff the girl was made of. She was no princess of mystery
now, crossing the moonlit sands; she was no gossamer wraith of a
girl miraculously with him for a time; she was a very hot and human
companion, worried and tired, shutting her dry mouth over any word
of complaint, smiling pluckily at him with dusty lips from the
shrouding hood of her veil. She was completely and thoroughly a
brick.

And Billy's heart ached for her, even while his spirit exulted in
her spirit.

"Beastly hot, isn't it?" he gasped, pulling his insufficient cap
down over his bloodshot eyes.

Valiantly she smiled. "What's a little--heat?" came joltingly back.

"And rough going."

"What's a little--roughness?"

There wasn't any word good enough for her. There wasn't any word
good enough to describe such superhuman courage and sweetness. Billy
had credited all beauties with being spoiled. All he had known had
been distinctly spoiled, even the near-beauties, and the not-so-near
ones, yet here was the most radiantly lovely girl he had ever seen
behaving like an angel of grit.

He didn't quite know what else he expected her to do--have
hysterics, perhaps, or weep, or reproach him for having taken a
wrong way and elected a rash course. He had known that this girl
could be a very minx when piqued. But in the graver crises of life
she proved herself a thoroughbred. She would go till she dropped and
never whimper.

He thought of all she must have been through in that horrible
palace, and he marvelled at the swiftness with which her spirit had
reverted to blitheness again. The disaster, that might have been so
stunning, so irremediable, had passed over her head like lightning
that had not struck.... Even the horror of it had seemed yesterday
to fade in her like the horror of an evil dream. That was what it
had been to her--an evil dream. She was so young, so much of her was
still a child, that the full terror had not touched her.

       *       *       *       *       *

They had come to a road at last, a road which seemed to be leading
in from the desert very gradually to the hills upon their left, and
it seemed to Billy that it must be a caravan road to Girgeh, and he
felt themselves upon the right track. They must keep their lead, and
when that lead seemed sufficient, they must put on all possible
speed to make the crossing through the hills into the Nile valley
ahead of their pursuers. Once more he stirred their lagging camels
into a jogging trot....

It was around the middle of the afternoon now, and it had been noon
since their tongues had tasted water. Arlee felt her mouth parched
and her tongue dry and curling; her skin was feverishly hot; her
whole body burned and ached, and her head was giddy with the heat
and the hunger. But she thought how little a thing it was to be hot
and hungry and tired--when one was free. And she drew the silver
shawl closer over her head and wrapped the silken tunic of her frock
about her scorching shoulders, and clung tight to the pommel of her
big saddle as her beast pounded on and on in his lurching stride.

       *       *       *       *       *

It had been some time since they had seen the dots, and now the road
ahead of them, like the former path they had abandoned, was turning
more and more to the left, winding in and out the low and broken
foothills, and as they followed its course with increasing security,
Billy began to tell himself that their fears had been unfounded and
the alarming horsemen were merely following their own route south.

And then he heard a whistle.

A prescience of danger shot through him. His fears returned a
hundredfold. Sharply he scanned the way about them, but nothing was
in sight. The whistle was not repeated; he could have imagined that
he dreamed it. An utter stillness possessed the wilderness.

And then around the corner of a jutting rock ahead of them a
horseman trotted, a big black man on a gray horse, and reined in,
waiting, facing them. Arlee gave a choking cry.

"The eunuch!" she gasped out.

Behind them Billy flung a lightning glance, and over the heads of
the dunes two more riders appeared, converging down upon them from
the rear. Three in sight--how many more behind the rocks?

Desperately Billy gripped his bridle rope, and with a wrenching pull
and a whack of his guiding stick he turned his camel sharply to the
left, snatching at Arlee's bridle rope as the beasts bumped against
each other in their surprise.

"Quick--this way," Billy commanded, and with the left hand clutching
the girl's rope, with the right he wielded the stick furiously. Out
over the sand both camels plunged, goaded into wild speed by such
violent measures, and a cheated yell broke from the horsemen and the
outcries of pursuit.

While rage at such unreason lasted the camels went like mad, but
such speed could not be for long. They had been hard ridden for two
days and they were nearly spent. The horsemen behind had drawn
together and hung on their trail like three hounds, riding
cautiously in the rear, but easily keeping the distance. It occurred
to Billy that these pursuers could have changed horses on the way,
and must inevitably tire them out. And then?

On and on he beat his poor beasts, racing toward the hills that,
just ahead of them, rose sharply from the broken ground, seeking
among them some fortress of rocks for a defiant stand.

A tug on the bridle rope nearly jerked it from his hand. Arlee's
camel had stumbled; the poor thing was lurching wearily.

"He can't go--any more," the girl cried out pitifully. "He--he's
sobbing. Don't beat him--I won't have him beaten!"

"We must get there," he called back, waving at the cliff-like rocks.

"Then go--on foot. I could--run faster."

"No, you couldn't," he shouted fiercely back.

She flared. "Don't you hit him again!"

The maddening absurdity of the quarrel in the face of hostile Africa
filled Billy with the futile fury of exasperation. He ground his
teeth, glowering at her, and wound her halter rope about his
smarting hand. All his hope was concentrated upon the necessity of
winning to that rocky shelter before their pursuers overtook them.
To him the camels were nothing in the face of such necessity.

They were going slower and slower; his blows had no avail now on
either beast. They plodded on. He turned suddenly in his saddle and
saw the three riders spreading fan-shape around them, the one in the
center nearest. He whipped out his gun and fired at the horse.

His own motion made the ball fly wild, but the horseman drew up
instantly, and the other edged discreetly away. And in the ensuing
moments the two fugitives gained the base of those cliff-like hills
and perceived the dark oblong of a cave mouth.

Down from their exhausted camels they flung themselves, and hand in
hand raced to the entrance of the cave. Coolness and blackness
received them. Their eyes discovered nothing of the tunnel-like
interior.

Putting Arlee some distance within, Billy went to the mouth and
stood, his gun in his hand, peering watchfully out. He saw the
horsemen draw together for a parley, then one remained on guard
while the others circled on separate ways beyond his range of sight.
His fear was that one of them might steal alongside the cave and
leap unexpectedly into its very mouth upon him, so with taut nerves
he crouched expectant.

Behind him Arlee gave a sudden shriek.

  [Illustration: "Billy went to the mouth, peering watchfully out"]




CHAPTER XX

A FRIEND IN NEED


He whirled. "I'll fire!" he warned, staring into the dark, but his
eyes, dazed with the sun, discerned nothing, and in utter ignorance
he faced the black possibilities.

"A man--a hand----" Arlee gasped incoherently.

"Good Lord, what is it?" said a voice so near at hand that both were
startled.

"Burroughs!" ejaculated Billy. "Is it you--Burroughs?"

"Yes, it's I, Burroughs," the owner of the voice retorted irritably.
"And who the deuce are you?"

"Hill--Billy B. Hill," came the jubilant answer, and "Billy be
damned!" said the astonished voice, with sudden joviality, and a
dark shape strode up to them. "What on earth are you doing here? And
what about that firing? Think I was a robber bold?"

"Well, there are three robber sneaks outside that we are hiding
from, so I wasn't sure.... Great Cæsar, old scout, but I'm glad to
see you! That puts us out of the woods at last.... It's the
excavator friend," he added, turning to Arlee. "Burroughs, I present
you to Miss Beecher. She and I have been having a thoroughly
impossible adventure."

"Let's have a little light upon these introductions," returned the
excavator, and a click was heard, and a light jumped out overhead,
flooding the tunnel-like place with brightness. In its beams the
three stood staring queerly at each other.

Arlee saw a slim, wiry young American, in rough khaki clothes
stained with work, a browned, unshaven young man with sleepy looking
eyes and a mouth like a steel trap.

What the excavator saw was more surprising. There was his friend
Billy, whom two weeks before he had seen off on a Nile steamer
returning to Cairo, in tropic splendor of white serge and Panama
hat, now a scarlet spectacle of sunburn and dirt, in most
disgraceful tweeds, and beside him what Burroughs took to be a child
in tatterdemalion white, a silky, fluttering white, which even his
untrained observation knew was hardly elected for desert wear. The
little girl's hair was hanging tangled over her shoulders, and was
much the color of the sand with which her face was coated, and
underneath that coating he saw that she was red as a peony with sun
and wind. They were a startling pair.

Gravely, with unchanging eyes, he acknowledged the introduction, and
then, "What's this about robbers?" he went on. "What kind of a yarn
are you putting over?"

"Nothing I want put over on the general public." Billy was thinking
very hard. "You're going to be our salvation, Burroughs, but even to
you--well, I'll put it briefly. We were having a desert ride and
some Turkish fellows who have annoyed her before chased us. There
are our camels, just outside. And you can see one of the fellows on
horseback keeping watch. The others are somewhere about.... And now,
for heaven's sake, get us a drink of water."

Burroughs walked to the door of the tomb and looked out an instant,
then he turned and went toward the back, returning with a small
native jar full of water.

"I've no glass, but if you can manage this----?" he said to Arlee,
and she clutched the cool pottery with two hot little hands and,
murmuring a quick affirmative, she put it to her lips.

Then she held it out to Billy.

"I suppose--we mustn't---drink as much as we want."

"I couldn't," said Billy, after a grateful swallowing. "I'd drain
the Nile.... Got a camp here?"

"Yes. You'd have seen my men any other time of day, but we knocked
off a while out of the sun," Burroughs explained. "I've rigged up
this tomb as living quarters while I'm here. Now what do you want me
to do? Would you like a guard?"

"We'd like a guard and a bath and cold cream," said Billy joyfully.
"And then we'd like dinner and donkeys."

Burroughs grunted.

"Umph--I should say you'd one donkey already in your
party--careering around the desert with a little girl like this," he
vouchsafed, and Arlee's eyes widened at his brusque nod at her. She
was staring about her now with a curious interest, for all her
aching tiredness, gazing wonderingly at the dazzling white walls
with their strange and brilliant paintings. She saw they were in a
long, deep chamber, from which other openings led to unimagined
deeps.

"I guess you never were in a place like this before?" Burroughs
inquired, and she shook her head dumbly, feeling suddenly too spent
for words.

"Can she get a rest here?" said Billy anxiously. "We've had the
devil of a ride."

"The place is all hers," returned Burroughs. "I'll send you some
food and cold cream--you mustn't wash that sunburn, you know, or
you'll be a sorry girl to-morrow--and then you can rest as long as
you like. How much of a hurry are you in?" he added to Billy.

"Well, we want to take a train to Luxor to-night. I suppose Girgeh's
the next station?"

"You suppose? You _are_ at sea--where did you start from, anyway?"
But hastily Burroughs sped from that inquisitive question. "Balliana
is your next station," he reported. "You've all the time you want,
and I'll take you over myself. Now make yourself as comfortable as
you can," he added to Arlee, handing her a big jar of cold cream and
lugging forward an armful of rugs. "I'll be back with some food in a
jiffy."

"You're very kind," Arlee spoke stanchly, but as soon as the two men
stepped from the tomb, she seemed to wilt down into the rugs and lay
there, too tired to stir.

Outside Burroughs blew sharply on a whistle, and from the mouth of
another cave a file of black boys in ragged robes made a straggling
appearance. Burroughs gave orders which resulted in a kindling of
fire and the opening of boxes, and then he walked back to where
Billy was surveying the weary camels. At a distance, like an
equestrian statue, the watching horseman was standing. Burroughs
stared hard at the distant Nubian, then stared harder at Billy.

"This is wonderful luck," Billy said to him, very soberly. "I didn't
think of you as nearer than Thebes."

"We just heard of some fresh finds here, so I'm combing over the
tombs.... But you--it's none of my business, Billy, but what in hell
are you doing racing over Egypt with a ten-year old kid?"

"Ten-year-old--Great Cæsar, man, that's a _real girl_! She's _grown
up_! She's old enough to vote--or nearly."

Burroughs stared harder than ever.

Then, "I shouldn't call that an extenuating circumstance," he
mentioned wryly.

"Extenuating nothing! Look here, let me----"

"You needn't tell me anything, you know," Burroughs suggested in
great indifference.

"Oh, shut up!" Billy spoke with deep disgust. "You've got to help us
out of this and then forget the whole business." He paused a moment;
then, "Miss Beecher made the mistake of taking a rash ride with me.
She was traveling alone, to meet some friends, to Luxor--and the
indiscretion is entirely mine, you understand. I got her into it.
And then, as I said, a Turkish fellow, that had been making himself
objectionable by following her, got his men out after us and chased
us down here. Her trunks have gone on to Luxor where those friends
are, and we have to find some presentable wraps for her and get her
to the first train. _Verstehen_?"

"Grasped--and forgotten," said his friend laconically. Just for an
instant his sleepy gaze touched Billy's rugged face, then fell
casually away. "I suppose any comments that occur to me are
superfluous?" he pleasantly observed.

"Completely.... And, Lord Harry, but I'm glad to see you!"

"Same here." Burroughs gave Billy's arm a friendly grip and Billy
spun fiercely about on him. "Don't you do that again!" he warned.
"Take the other one. That's got a--a scratch."

"A scratch? One of those fellows wing you out there? Let me have a
look----"

"No, it's all right--it's nothing----"

"Let me see, you old chump----"

"It's all right, I tell you. It's been taken care of--it's just a
relic of Cairo."

"Cairo!" Slowly Burroughs let fall the hand he had laid upon Billy's
arm. "You do seem to be having a lively trip," he commented,
grinning. "Here, hurry up, you rascals, hurry up with that big jug."

Taking the large jar from them, he returned to the tomb, stopping
abruptly at sight of Arlee's weary abandon. She half sat up, a
frail, exhausted little figure, whose grace was strangely appealing
through all her sandy dishevelment.

"Some water--for washing," he stammered.

"You're very thoughtful."

"I'll have to beg your pardon," he blurted, for Burroughs was no
squire of dames. "I thought you were a little girl and spoke to you
as if----"

"It's just the hairpins that make the difference, isn't it?" said
Arlee, with a whimsical smile. "I don't suppose you have any of
those in camp that I could borrow?"

He shook his head regretfully. Then his brain seized upon the
problem. "Bent wires?" he suggested. "I might try----"

"Do," she besought. "I'll be grateful forever."

He withdrew to make the attempt, and in his place came Billy with a
tray of luncheon.

"Just--put it down," Arlee said faintly. "I'll eat--by and by."

Worriedly Billy looked down on the girl. Her eyes closed. Excitement
had ebbed, leaving her like some spent castaway on the shores. He
dropped on his knees beside her, dipping a clean handkerchief in the
jar of cold cream.

"Just let me get this off," he said quietly. "You'll feel better."

Like a child she submitted, lying with closed eyes while with
anxious care he took the sand from her delicate, burning skin. He
did the same for her listless hands; he brushed back her hair and
put water on her temples; he dabbed more cold cream tenderly on the
pathetic little blisters on her lips.

"I'm--all right." The blue eyes looked suddenly up at him with a
clear smile. "I'm--just resting."

"And now you'll eat a bit?"

Obediently she took the sandwich he made for her, and lifted her
head to drink the cup of tea.

"I'm a--nuisance," she murmured.

"You're a _brick_!" he gave back, with muffled intensity. "You're a
perfect brick!"

Then he backed hastily out of her presence, for fear his stumbling
tongue would betray him--or his clumsy, longing hands--or his
foolish eyes. He felt choking with the tenderness he must not
express. He ached with his Big Brother pity for her, and with his
longing for her, which wasn't in the least Big Brotherly, and with
all the queer, bewildering jumble of emotion that she had power to
wake in him.

Very silently he returned to Burroughs, and when he had made a
trifle of a toilet and eaten far from a trifle of lunch, the two
young men stretched themselves out in the shade, just beyond the
entrance of the tomb, conversing in low tones, while around them the
labor song of Burroughs' workmen rose and fell in unvarying
monotony, as from a nearby hole they carried out baskets of sand
upon their heads and poured the contents upon the heap where the
patient sifters were at work.

Burroughs talked of his work, the only subject of which he was
capable of long and sustained conversation. He dilated upon a rare
find of some blue-green tiles of the time of King Tjeser, a third
dynasty monarch, and a mummy case of one of the court of King Pepi,
of the sixth dynasty, "about 3300 B.C.," he translated for
Billy, and then suddenly he saw that Billy's eyes were absent and
Billy's pipe was out.

In sudden silence he knocked out the ashes from his own pipe and
slowly refilled it. "Congratulations," he ejaculated, and at Billy's
slow stare he jerked his head back toward the tomb. "I say,
congratulations, old man."

"Oh!" Billy became ludicrously occupied with the dead pipe.

"Nothing doing," he returned decidedly.

"No? ... I thought----"

"You sounded as if you had been thinking. Don't do it again."

"And also I had been remembering," said Burroughs, with caustic
emphasis, "knowing that in the past wherever youth and beauty was
concerned----"

So successfully had that past been sponged from Billy's concentrated
heart, so utterly had other youth and beauty ceased to exist for
him, that he greeted the reminder with belligerent unwelcome.

"I tell you it was all an accident," he retorted irritably. "There's
nothing more to it.... Hello, our horseman is coming this way
again!"

Grateful for the interruption to this ticklish excursion into his
sacred emotions, he jumped to his feet and went out to meet the man
who was riding slowly toward them, the two others in his train.
Burroughs went with him, and a brief parley followed.

"He says," Burroughs translated, "that these are his camels and he
is going to take them away. He says you stole them from him at
Assiout."

"That's right," Billy confirmed easily. "He can have 'em," and
Burroughs, vouchsafing no comment on this curious development, gave
the message to the Nubian. Then he turned again to Billy. "He wants:
the money for their hire."

"For their----! Of all the dad-blasted, iron-clad cheek! You just
tell him for me that he'll get his 'hire' all right if he hangs
around me. Tell him I'll have him arrested for molesting and robbing
travelers; and tell him to tell his master that if he shows his head
near an English girl again I'll have him hanged as high as
Haman--and shot to pieces while he swings! The infernal
scoundrel----"

Whatever work Burroughs made of this translation it sent the sullen,
inscrutable-looking fellow off in silence, his followers leading the
recovered camels.

"And may that be the last of them," said Billy B. Hill, in fervent
thanksgiving. "Except Kerissen. I've got to meet him again--just
once."

       *       *       *       *       *

Perhaps it was the hairpins. Perhaps it was the bathed face and the
sleep-brightened eyes and the rearranged gown. But certainly
Burroughs stared in amazement at the slim little figure that issued
from the entrance, and a queer, a very queer confusion seized upon
him. Not even outrageous sunburn and pathetic blisters could hide
Arlee's young loveliness. They only added an utterly upsetting
tenderness to the beholder, and a most dangerous compassion.

And just as each man is smitten with madness after the manner of his
kind, so Burroughs, the taciturn, was struck into amazing
volubility. As they sat about a cracker box of a table at an early
supper, he became a perfect fount of information, pouring out to
this girl an account of his diggings that would have astounded any
of his intimates, and would surely have amazed Billy B. Hill if that
young man had been in a condition to notice his friend's
performances. But he was wrapped in a personal gloom that had
descended on him like a cloud of unreason. The escapade was nearly
over. The little girl comrade was gone, the little girl whose face
he had so tenderly scrubbed of its grimy sand. A very self-possessed
young lady was sitting beside him, drinking her coffee, an utterly
lovely and gracious young lady--but unfathomably remote--elusive....

Perhaps, again, it was the hairpins.

Off to town on donkey back the three Americans rode slowly, a native
escort filing after, and there in town the bazaars yielded a long
pongee dust coat and a straw hat and a white veil, "to escape
detection," Arlee gaily said, and a satchel which she filled with
mysterious purchases, and then, clad once more in the semblance of
her traveling world, safe and sound and undiscovered, she stood upon
the station platform, awaiting the train to Luxor.

Beside her, two very quiet young men responded but feebly to the
flow of spirits that had amazingly succeeded her exhaustion.
Burroughs was suddenly suffering from a depression most unfamiliar
to his practical mind, which caused him to moon about his work for
days and made his depleted jar of cold cream a wincing memory, and
Billy was increasingly glum.

It was all over now. The girl, who for two winged days had been so
magically his gypsy comrade, was returning to her own world, the
world in which he played so infinitesimal a part. For very pride's
sake now he could never force himself upon her ... as he might
before ...

He stared down at her eagerly, hopefully, for a sign of regret at
the ending of this strange companionship, much as a big Newfoundland
might watch for a caress from a cherished but tyrannic hand, but not
a scrap of regret was evidenced. She was as blithe as a cricket. Her
only pang was for discovery.

"You're sure," she murmured as Burroughs left them to interview the
station clerk, "you're sure they'll never know?"

"I'm positive," he stolidly responded. "Just stick to your story."

"The Evershams won't question--they are never interested in other
people," she mused, with thankfulness. "But Mr. Falconer----"

"Won't have a doubt," said Billy firmly. His gloom closed in thickly
about him.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was a local, a train of corridor compartments. In one, marked
"Ladies Alone," Arlee was ensconced, with an Englishwoman and her
maid, and two pleasant German women, and in another Billy B. Hill
sat opposite some young Copts and lighted pipe after pipe. When the
train started out on the High Bridge across the Nile to the eastern
bank, he came out in the corridor to look out the wide glass windows
there, and found Arlee beside him.

"How do you do?" she said brightly. "How nice to meet accidentally
like this--you see, I'm rehearsing my story," she added under her
breath.

"Let's see if you have it straight," he told her.

"I arrive on a local which left Cairo this morning.... Did I come
alone?"

"You'd better invent some nice traveling friend----"

She shook her head in flat refusal. "I won't. I'm not equal to
inventing anything. It's bad enough now to--to tell the _necessary_
lies I have to." The brightness left her face looking suddenly wan
and sorry. "I suppose it's part of my--punishment--for my dreadful
folly," she said in a low tone.

"It's just part of the coin the world has to be paid in for its
conventions," Billy quickly retorted. "_Don't_ let it worry you like
that--in a day no one will think to question you."

"I know--but--it's having the memory always there. Always knowing
that there is something I can't be honest about--something secret
and dreadful----"

She was staring unseeingly out the window, her soft lips twitching.

"The Egyptians were a most sensible people," said Billy. "They drew
up a list of commandments against the forty-two cardinal sins, and
one of them was this, 'Thou shalt not consume thy heart.' That is a
religious law against regret--vain, unprofitable, morbid,
devastating regret. And you must take that law for your own."

"Th--thank you." The low voice was suspiciously wavery. "I--you see,
I haven't had time to think about it till just now--we've been going
so fast----"

"And the best thing that could have happened. And now that you have
the time to think, you mustn't think _weakly_. It was just a
nightmare. And it's over."

"Just a nightmare.... And it's over," she repeated. Her eyes lifted
to Billy's in a look of ineffable softness and wonder. "It's
over--because _you_ came."

"I want you to forget that." The young man spoke with cold curtness
in his effort to combat the wild temptation of that moment. "I only
did what anyone else in my place would have done--to have
accomplished it is all the gratitude I want. Please don't speak of
it to me again. You must forget about it."

"Forget--as if I could help being grateful as long as I live!"

"But I don't _want_ you to be grateful. It--it's obnoxious to me!"

She was as blankly hurt as a slapped child. Then she looked away, a
little pulse in her throat beating fast. "Then I won't--try to thank
you," she answered in a very small voice, and stared harder and
harder out the window.

Billy felt that he had accomplished a tremendous stride. "A feeling
of obligation kills a friendship," he told her didactically, "and I
want you to be really my friend."

"I am." Her voice was distinct, though queerly lack-luster. And she
did not look at him again.

He went on: "The Evershams will be in on the boat about seven. From
the station I'll take you straight to the boat, where your stateroom
is surely being kept for you. Then to-morrow your trunks will arrive
from Cook's, and by the time you are through resting, you will be
ready to sally out and meet the world.... I hope my own trunk will
make its appearance, too," he added. "I telegraphed the hotel to
pack my things and send them on."

She made no comment on the obvious haste with which he had left
Cairo. She said slowly, "I want to do a little mathematics now. What
is the shocking sum I owe you?"

He shut his lips in an obstinate line. After a moment she added, "I
can't take _that_, you know."

It struck him as a trifle ludicrous that dollars were so important
among all the rest, but unwillingly enough he understood.

"Won't you just let it stand as it is?" he said under his breath.
"Let me have the whole thing--please."

"I can't."

"You mean you won't?"

"I can't," she repeated inflexibly, and then, with a childish flash,
"Since you dislike me to feel grateful--I should think you would be
glad to let me reduce the debt."

"All right." He spoke gruffly. "Then you owe me what you spent just
now and what your railroad ticket cost. Not a cent more. For what
went before I am absolutely responsible, and I decline to let you
pay _my_ debts."

This time he was inflexible. She repeated, with a spark of
resentment, "It's not fair to let you pay so much----"

"It was _my_ adventure," said Billy firmly.

She said, "Very well," in a voice that puzzled him. He felt she
was annoyed. And he realized more than ever that he could never
take advantage of her indebtedness to make her pay with her
companionship. It was becoming a queer tangle.... He felt they had
suddenly slipped out of tune.... She seemed to be escaping
him--withdrawing ...

He wondered, very unhappily, with no fine glow of altruism at all,
if he had rescued her for another man. Those things happened, they
happened with dismal frequency. Billy distinctly recalled the
experience of a college friend who had carried a girl out of a
burning hotel, to have her wildly embrace an unstirring youth below.
Yes, such things happened. But he had never contemplated having
anything like that happen to him.

He contemplated it now, however, contemplated it long and bitterly,
when Arlee had gone back to her compartment and he sat silent in his
beside the chattering Copts while the train rattled on and on. There
would be three days at Luxor before the boat proceeded upon its
southern journey. And then----

Three days.... Three miserable, paltry, insufficient days, blighted
by the chaperoning Evershams.... Frantically he hoped against his
dark foreboding that one menace at least might be averted--that by
now Luxor would have ceased to shelter a certain sandy-haired young
Englishman.




CHAPTER XXI

CROSS PURPOSES


Luxor was warm and drowsy with afternoon sun. Motionless the fronds
of the tall palms along the water front; motionless the columns of
the temple reflected in the blue Nile. Even the almost continuous
commotion of the landing stage was stilled.

The two big Nile steamers, of rival lines, lay quietly at rest,
emptied of their tourists, and on the embankment the dragomans, the
donkey boys, the innumerable venders, were lounging in the shade at
dominoes or dice.

In the big white hotels facing the river many drawn blinds spoke of
napping travelers, and in the shade of the garden of the Grand other
travelers were whiling away the listless inertia of the hour before
tea.

"I suppose it's _quite_ too early?" murmured a girl at one of the
tables, in the shade of a big acacia. Her companion, fussing with a
pastel sketch, answered absently, without looking up, "Oh, quite,"
and then with a note of brisker attention, "I thought we were
waiting for Robert?"

"Do you think he'll be back? It's _such_ a trip to the Tombs of the
Kings, you know!"

"To be sure he'll be back!" Miss Falconer spoke with asperity. "And
why he wanted to go over it again--it's odd you didn't care to go,
too, Claire," she added, most inconsequently. "It was such an
excellent opportunity--and you had already spoken of wishing to go
again."

"But not so exhaustively. They are doing the entire programme. I
only wanted some particular things."

"You could have done them."

"And it was hot."

"It must have been just as hot in the bazaars with Mr. Hill."

"Was it?"

This was purposeful vagueness and Miss Falconer's crayon snapped.
She made a sound of annoyance, then began gathering her sketching
things tidily together. Presently, "He's rather an agreeable person,
that young American, after all," she cannily observed.

"Why, after all?" Lady Claire was implacably aloof.

"Well, first impressions, you know----"

"_My_ first impressions of Mr. Hill were very delightful." The
English girl laughed softly, her eyes full of reminiscent amusement.
"He was a _deus ex machina_ to me--I quite jumped at him, I assure
you!"

"You don't have to assure me!" was the elder lady's unspoken
comment. She had been in a state of chronic irritation, ever since
that Friday noon when Billy B. Hill's tall figure had appeared in
the hotel dining room. And hurrying Claire away from the
conversation he was promptly evoking, she had encountered Arlee
Beecher and the Evershams streaming with the other passengers from
their boat to see the temple of Luxor, a wonderfully gay and excited
Arlee, so radiant in the happiness of her own safe world again that
she was bright gladness incarnate.... Instantly Robert had reverted
to his alarming infatuation ... and Lady Claire had most shamelessly
welcomed the American. It was all unspeakably annoying....

Aloud Miss Falconer observed, "I wonder what brought Mr. Hill back
to the Nile."

"I wonder," said Lady Claire pleasantly. "But it makes it very nice
for us, doesn't it?" she continued amiably. "He knows quite
_everything_ about temples."

"And particularly nice for Miss Beecher--though I can't say she is
treating him very well. However, that may be their way. 'Romance
apart from results,' was, I believe, his phrase."

Lady Claire was silent. But not overlong. "You really think----?"
she suggested tranquilly.

"He came on the same train."

"Coincidence. He mentioned he did not see her in the train till
Balliana."

"Umph!" Miss Falconer drew out of her bag the especial knitting
which she reserved for the Sabbath, and her fingers flew with
expressive spirit. "It's scandalous," she said at length. "Girls
gadding about the face of the earth--picking up chaperons when they
remember them."

"It's their way, you know."

"Oh, yes, it's their way. And their men seem to like it. Mr. Hill
didn't seem to consider it even _unusual_.... But as I said, he's
hardly a judge," Miss Falconer went on unsparingly. "The man's
bewitched. He never takes his eyes off her."

"I'm sure I don't blame him." Lady Claire's tone was most
successfully admiring. "She's too _wonderful_, isn't she, with those
great blue eyes and that astonishing hair! I'm sure Robert is
bewitched, too!"

"Nonsense!" But Miss Falconer's tone was too vigorous, betraying the
effort to rout a palpable enemy. "What nonsense!" she repeated.
"He's civil--naturally--when _you_ haven't a moment for him. The boy
has pride. Too much." The knitting needles clicked warningly.

"Civil!" The girl's low laughter was mocking. "Dear Miss Falconer,
you are such an _euphuist_!"

Miss Falconer looked up, a trifle startled. Her young charge was
more than a match for her in irony, but the elder lady did not lack
for solid perseverance, and she charged on undeterred.

"Of course the girl's pretty--too pretty. And Robert's a man--he has
eyes in his head and likes to please them. And she knows who he is
and draws him on."

"I don't think Miss Beecher cares a twopence who Robert is," said
Lady Claire honestly. "When I told her he was going to stand for
Roxham she answered that she had a very poor opinion of M.P.s--from
reading Mrs. Ward. I can't _quite_ see what she meant--but as for
her drawing him on, a moment ago, dear, you were accusing her of
luring Mr. Hill back from Cairo."

"I said he followed. I daresay she lured, too. The second
string----"

"Then it's quite _nice_ of me, isn't it, to carry off her second
string to the bazaars and prevent her playing him against Robert!"

Lady Claire laughed mischievously, in a flight of daring so foreign
to her usual reticence that Miss Falconer grimly perceived that she
was changed indeed. She thought helplessly that it was a great pity
that young people couldn't be treated as the children they
were--smacked and made to do what was best for them.

"And after all this dreadful gossiping how can we face our guests at
tea?" the girl continued in mock chiding.

"If they are much later we shall not be facing them at all," the
older woman declared. "I shall certainly have my tea at the proper
time."

The sight of an Arab servant with a tray of dishes had stirred her
to this declaration, and promptly she gave her order. In the middle
of it, "I'm always late!" said a merry voice, and little Miss
Beecher and Falconer were standing on the grass beside them.

"This time we had no following engagement," said Miss Falconer,
unpleasantly reminiscent of another tea time in Cairo, ten days
before, but even with her resentment of this American girl's
intrusion into her long-cherished plans, she could not prevent the
softening of her regard as she gazed upon her.

"You don't look as if you had been riding very hard at the Tombs of
the Kings," she observed, in reluctant admiration.

"Oh, but we have! We did quite a lot of Tombs--not anything like
thoroughly, of course!--and then we rode back early and made
ourselves tidy for your tea party," Arlee blithely explained, and
Miss Falconer perceived that her brother Robert had returned to the
hotel without seeking them out, had arrayed himself in fresh white
flannels and returned to the boat to escort Miss Beecher across the
road into the hotel garden.

Absently she sighed. Her eyes fell away from the peach-blossom
prettiness of Arlee's lovely face to the subtle simplicity of her
white frock of loosely woven silk, and she wondered if that heavy
embroidery meant money--or merely spending money. And then she
looked across at Lady Claire, and sighed again for her dream of an
aristocratic alliance.

"Mrs. Eversham--?" she thought to inquire.

"They're having the vicar--or is it the rector?--to tea. They asked
him this morning before your message came," Arlee explained. She did
not explain that the vicar, or the rector, had imagined, in
accepting, that she, too, was to be of that tea party on the boat
and was even now inquiring zealously of her of the Evershams.

"Here's Mr. Hill," said Lady Claire.

Miss Falconer stirred; there was room for the fifth chair between
her and Arlee. Lady Claire also stirred; there was room between her
and Robert Falconer. And there Billy B. Hill seated himself after a
general exchange of greetings.

"How were the bazaars?" said Arlee gaily across the table.

"You mean the department store of Mr. Isaac Cohen," Billy laughed
back. "They are all under him, you know."

"Not _really_!" Falconer exclaimed, in disillusionment. "It rather
takes it out, doesn't it, to know it is so commercialized."

"What did you expect--it is the twentieth century," Miss Falconer
retorted, putting aside her knitting as the tea things arrived.

"Sometimes it is," said Arlee.

"I think it's more so than ever, here," declared Lady Claire.
"Egypt's so _frightfully_ civilized----"

"Not when you're camping in the desert."

Again that funny little smile flitted over Arlee's face; not once
did she glance at Billy, but for all her air of unconsciousness he
felt that she was subtly sharing her thoughts with him and a quick
spark of gladness flashed in him.

Those had been three horrible days for Billy B. Hill.

Friday morning he had been practically a prisoner until his trunks
had arrived. He had emerged upon a spectacle of England
triumphant--Robert Falconer escorting Arlee to the temple of Luxor.
Later that afternoon he had called upon Arlee upon the boat to find
Falconer still there, and the Evershams very much so.

Robert Falconer had accompanied him back to the hotel. There was
something that he wanted to ask, and he asked it bluntly, but with
embarrassment. Had Billy said anything at all to Arlee of that
nonsense at the palace?

Here was a contingency for which Billy was not provided. He made no
provisions for this with Arlee.

"Have you?" he parried.

"Not a word," said the young Englishman. "We've not mentioned the
fellow's filthy name. But I wondered----"

"I did tell her we got worried one night, and tried to get into his
palace like a pair of brigands," Billy answered slowly.

"She must have thought us great fools," the sandy-haired young man
replied disgustedly. Clearly he felt that Billy had flourished this
story before Arlee to appear romantic, and he winced at its
absurdity.

"Oh, no--she just thought of it as a lark on our part," Billy went
on. "I didn't let her in for the horrible details--I don't think
she's likely to mention it to you. Or you to her," he added.

"Rather not." The young Englishman was emphatic. "I'm sorry you said
anything about it." Then he looked at Billy, a crinkle of amusement
in his eyes. "Rather a sell, you know--what?"

"I should say so!" returned Billy, with a hearty appearance of
chagrin, and a laugh cemented the understanding.

That was all between them concerning the escapade.

Billy had raced back to the boat, and secured an earnest fifteen
minutes with Arlee, who promised unlimited care, and then forced
upon him the wretched sovereigns that she owed. She was feeling
desperately spent and tired after her day of excitement, and
declared herself unequal to the dance upon the boat that evening.
Anxiously Billy had urged her to rest, and he spent a drifting and
distracted evening roaming alone in the temple of Luxor listening
to the distant music from the boat--thinking of Arlee.... Later he
had learned that she remained up for at least two dances with
Falconer.

So much for Friday. Saturday had been worse. Arlee had said on
Friday night that she would join the passengers in the all-day
excursion to the Tombs of the Kings, and Billy had somehow found
himself in an arrangement with Lady Claire and Falconer to go with
them. Then Arlee had not gone. Mrs. Eversham reported that she had a
headache, and Falconer had very promptly dropped out of the party,
leaving Billy with Lady Claire upon his hands, and so he went, and
he and Lady Claire and the Evershams and about sixty other
passengers had a brisk and busy day of it. When he returned just
before dinner he saw Arlee, apparently headacheless, upon the deck
of the steamer, chatting to Falconer.

That night she had attended the dance at the hotel under Miss
Falconer's wing. Billy had danced with her twice, and between times
his pride had kept him aloof--she might just have made one sign! But
though her bright friendliness was ever responsive; though she was
instantly, submissively, ready to accept his invitations or fulfill
his requests, he felt that there was something strangely lacking.

The gay spark of her coquetry was gone; she did not tease or play
with him; animated as she was in company, when they were alone
together a constraint fell upon her.

Miserably he felt that he reminded her of unhappy scenes and that
she would be secretly relieved when he was gone.

So now he was absurdly glad to hear her declare, in answer to Lady
Claire's questionings, "Oh, but the desert is wonderful! I loved it
in spite of----"

"In spite of--?" Lady Claire echoed.

"The sand," said Arlee promptly. But under her lashes, her eyes
came, at last, half-scared, to Billy's face.

"But the sand _is_ the desert," Lady Claire was murmuring.

"It's only part of it," Billy took it upon himself to answer. "Space
is the biggest part--and then color. And sometimes--heat."

"You spent quite a time on the desert edge with some excavators,
didn't you?" said the English girl, and Billy fell into talk with
her about his friend's work, and Falconer and his sister engrossed
Arlee.

And to-night was the very last night of her stay at Luxor. To-morrow
the boat would take her on out of his life--unless he pursued her
along the Nile, a foolish, unwanted intruder.... The three days here
had all slipped from his clumsy grasp--they seemed to have put a
widening distance between them.... He heard Falconer calculating
that the boat would touch again at Luxor for the next Friday night.
There seemed to be talk of a masked ball....

Billy leaned suddenly across the table.

"You have forgotten it's the best of the moon to-night?" he asked.
"You must let me take you to see it on Karnak."

Falconer gave him a very blank look.

"We've already planned for that," said he.

"We'll all go," cried Arlee, with instant pleasantness. "We mustn't
miss it for anything."

"You haven't seen the moon on the temple yet?" Billy inquired of
Lady Claire in the pause that ensued.

"Only once--four nights ago. But it wasn't full then."

Billy remembered that moon acutely. It had lighted two fugitives
across a waste of sand. He saw a little figure swaying rhythmically
high upon a camel, a quaint, old-world figure in misty white, with a
shimmering silver veil--like Rebecca coming across the desert, he
thought oddly. Then he looked up and saw a most modern figure in
white across the table, nibbling a cress sandwich, and laughing at
some jest of the Englishman's....

With a start he realized that Lady Claire was waiting for an answer.

"I beg your pardon. You asked----?"

"If _you_ had seen the temple in moonlight, Mr. Hill."

"Not Karnak--only Luxor--night before last."

"Only Luxor!" The girl beside him laughed. "How spoiled you are, Mr.
Hill! _Only_ Luxor!"

It came to Billy, with the force of revelation, that it was going to
be _only_ a great many things for him after this.... Those wild days
in the desert had seen to that, with devastating completeness....
Girls were only other girls--and delight in them a lost word. This
charming one beside him, with the friendly eyes where a faint shadow
of wistfulness underlay the surface brightness, was only Lady
Claire....

He wondered if he was going on like this forever. He wondered if he
was everlastingly to carry this memory about with him, like a
bullet.... Suddenly he felt enraged at himself, at his dumb pain and
useless longings, and with a stanch semblance of animation he flung
himself into the flow of talk which this pretty English girl was so
ready to offer him.




CHAPTER XXII

UPON THE PYLON


Two miles of Sphinxes in the moonlight--a double row of them on each
side of the way from the temple of Luxor--and then a towering pylon
overhead. Karnak was reached.

Out of the victoria jumped two young men in evening clothes, one
sandy-haired with a slight moustache, the other black-haired and
clean shaven, and handed out three ladies. The first lady was
middle-aged and haughty featured, in a black evening gown overhung
with a black and gold Assiout shawl; the second was a tall girl in a
rose cloak, the third was a small girl, and her cloak was a delicate
blue.

There was a pause at the pylon for the presentation of the little
red entrance books, and then the gate closed behind them, and the
five moved cautiously forward into the shadowy dark of the confusion
of the ruins. Beside the blue-cloaked girl bent the sandy-haired
young man; the black-haired young man was between the rose-cloaked
girl and the lady with the Roman nose.

"You must be our dragoman, Mr. Hill; I understand you are up on all
this," said the lady, adhering closely to his side. "Where are we
now?"

"Temple of Khonsu," said Billy with bitter brevity. Ahead of them
Arlee's blonde head was uptilted toward Falconer's remarks.

"Khonsu? I never heard of him! Or is it her?" Lady Claire laughingly
demanded.

"Khonsu is the son of the god, Amon, or Amon-Ra, and the goddess,
Mut, and so is the third person of the trinity of Thebes," Billy
pedagogically recited, his eyes on the little white shoes ahead
picking their delicate way over the fallen stones. "This temple at
Karnak is the temple of the god Amon, and so it was natural for old
Rameses the third to put the temple to Khonsu under the father's
wing like this--but it spoils the effect of the entrance from this
pylon. You don't get Karnak's bigness at a burst--but wait till you
reach the court ahead. Then you'll see Karnak."

And then they did see it--as much as one view can give of that vast
desolation. Ahead of them, shadowy and mysterious in the velvet dark
and silver pallor of the stars, loomed the columns of the great
court, huge monoliths that dwarfed to pigmies the tiny groups of
people dotting the ground about them, trying to say something
appropriate.

The place had been made for dead and gone gods, giants of gods, and
their spirits stalked now through its waste spaces, dominating and
ironic. There was an air about the place that seemed to scorn the
facile awe it woke in the breasts of the beholders and that fleered
at the human banalities upon their lips.

"There are no words for a spot like this," said a voice near them.

"Silence is fittest," corroborated a second voice.

"Thomas Hardy once said, speaking of the heavens," said the first
voice again, "'There is a size at which dignity begins; farther on
there is a size at which grandeur begins; farther on there is a size
at which solemnity begins; farther on a size at which awfulness
begins; farther on a size at which ghastliness begins.' Surely that
was written unknowingly for this temple of Karnak?"

A fluttering murmur from the group confirmed this thought.

"Nice little speech," said Falconer in an undertone.

The second voice was raised a trifle resentfully. "Yet was not the
very pith of it spoken by Ruskin when he stood upon this identical
spot? His words were these, 'At last size tells!'"

Another murmur agreed that it was indeed the pith.

"That's Clara Eversham," said Arlee under her breath. "They came
over early with some people from the boat."

"She must be frightfully up on the guide books," muttered Falconer.

"She's a _miner_ in them," Arlee laughed, as they made their way
over the rubbishy ground where great beams of stone and fallen
statues lay half-buried in the sands.

"They must be very glad to have you back again with them," Falconer
told her, trying hard to keep their progress ahead of the others.

"Oh, I don't know!" Honest dubiety spoke in Arlee's tone. "They
have mentioned twice how convenient it was to use my stateroom!"

"They felt very badly when you ran away from them in Cairo."

"I was shockingly sudden about that," owned the girl lightly, "but
the chance came--Are we going to climb the great pylon now?"

"It will be a jolly high place to see the moon rise."

       *       *       *       *       *

It _was_ a jolly high place to see the moon rise, and to see all
Karnak, and all Luxor, with its high Moslem minaret towering over
its crumbling columns, and to see the dark and distant country with
its tiny hamlets crouching under humbler mosques and lonely palms,
and on the other side the wide and winding Nile with the shadowy
cliffs of Thebes beyond. It gave Arlee the dizzying sensation of
being suspended between heaven and earth, so high was she above
those far-reaching plains, so high above the giant columns beneath
her, the vast beamed roofs, the pointing obelisks. It made her
breath quicken and her pulses beat.

"Watch the moon," said Falconer in a low tone.

Blood-red it rose behind the dark pile, throwing into sinister
relief a gallows-like angle of stone beams, then higher and higher
it soared till its resplendent light poured unchecked into the wide
courts and broken temples, the unroofed altars and the empty
shrines.

"A dead world lighting a dead world," said Arlee under her breath.

"I could read by it," stated Miss Falconer impressively.

Lady Claire glanced up at Billy with a touch of mischief. "Would you
like to paint it?" she suggested.

"Heaven forbid!" said Billy soberly.

Falconer said nothing at all, except to Arlee. He was very shrewdly
drawing her to the other end of the pylon, seeing that the time of
descent was nearly upon them. And when the time arrived, and the
English ladies and their stoic escort started down the steep steps,
Falconer made no motion of following them. He stood still, his hands
in his pockets, and chuckled softly at the sound of his sister's
voice, floating lesseningly up to them.

"How Emma is dragoning that William Whatdycallit Hill," he said
appreciatively.

"Why do you call him that?" questioned Arlee.

"Oh, that chap is so deuced odd about that name of his. I asked him
what the B. stood for, and he looked me in the eye like a fighting
cock and said for his middle name.... Queer chap--" Suddenly
Falconer looked sidewise at Arlee and stopped.

"He is--unusual," she agreed, moving toward the steps.

The curious expression upon Falconer's face deepened. "Let 'em go
on," he said jerkily. "I don't want to leave this yet, do you?"

Arlee glanced about hesitantly, without answering, and slowly she
let fall the white froth of skirt she had been gathering for the
descent.

In silence she looked out over the temple. The moon had paled from
fire to molten silver now, and like scattered sparks of it burned
the thousand circling stars. She felt very strange and unreal--a
tiny figure topping this great gate in the face of the ancient
silence....

"We never have a chance for a word together," Falconer was mumbling,
with a nervous hand at his mustache.

Her thoughts came fleetly back from the ancient worlds.... Her own
was upon her. She turned and laughed at him. "We've talked for three
whole days!"

"Have we? But always in some group.... I understand that Hill told
you what a couple of donkeys we made of ourselves on your account?"
Anxiously he scanned her face, silver-clear in the moonlight, for
signs of ridicule.

But Arlee's smile was very sweet. It made the sandy-haired young
man's heart quicken mysteriously. "He told me," she said. "I think
it was fine of you."

"Fine? It was lunacy.... He'd got worked up over some horrible story
he'd heard," went on the young man in the mingling humor and
embarrassment, "and nothing for it but that you'd gone the same way.
And if you'll believe it, he had us prowling around that old palace
like a pair of jolly idiots primed to get their heads blown off--and
served us jolly well right! He was in luck to get off with nothing
but a scratch."

"A scratch--? You mean--you _don't_ mean----?"

"He didn't tell you that?" Falconer was surprised; he had imagined
that Billy's narration had led romantically to Billy's wound. He
made the American a silent apology. "He was shot in the arm."

"Badly?"

"Of course not badly--he's all right now, isn't he? He said it was a
scratch."

Arlee was silent. He had been hurt all the time that he had been
riding with her over the desert ... he had been hurt all through
those horrible hot hours. And he had said nothing....

"When I think of what that chap got me in for--scaling a man's
walls, smashing in his locks, letting myself down the front of his
house like a monkey on a rope! I might have been a dashed school kid
again." Resentment and reluctant humor struggled in the young man's
speech. "Why, the fellow has the imagination of a detective ... and
of course he had some reason." Falconer's thoughts touched on the
fair-haired girl of Fritzi's report. "I'll admit he had me
worried--until I heard from the Evershams that you were all O.K. You
see what bally nonsense you put into young men's heads," he added
with a look of meaning.

"He's a very--chivalrous--young man," said Arlee.

"He's a very unbalanced young idiot," contradicted Falconer. "I
rather like the chap, himself, you know; he has nerve to spare--but
no ballast. He might have set all Cairo talking of you." His voice
hardened; "I told him that. I told him you wouldn't thank him for
it."

"I do thank him. I thank him with all my heart."

"Well, you've no reason to," Falconer returned in blunt belief.
"Linking your name with that Turk fellow; hinting you were in the
palace--he might have started a lot of rotten rumor!"

"What's--rumor?" said the girl in a breathless voice. "He was
thinking of--my safety!"

"Well, your safety didn't depend on him, did it?" Sharp jealousy of
her defense of the American intruder drove Falconer to unseemly
curtness. He gave a short laugh. "You and I," he said, "seem to be
always tilting over some chap or other."

A faint smile touched the girl's lips, a sorry little smile, edged
with rueful reminiscence ... and strange comparisons. In silence she
looked down into the shadowy temple courts where absurdly
small-looking people were strolling to and fro, while Falconer stood
looking down at her, with something akin to angry wonder in his
adoring eyes.

"Why didn't you write to a chap?" he abruptly demanded.

"Why should I?"

"Then you meant to let it go at that?" He drew a sharp breath. "Just
the way you flared off from that table--not a word more?"

"Why didn't you write?" the girl parried.

"I did," indignantly. "Twice--to Alexandria."

"Oh.... I didn't get them."

"I wrote, all right. I was so stirred up over that alarm of Hill's
that I urged you to answer me at once. And when you didn't, and when
I heard you _had_ written the Evershams, well, I thought I knew what
I had to think.... When I met you here Friday I half expected you to
cut me, upon my word!"

"But I didn't!" She laughed softly. "I remembered you--perfectly."

"Oh, you did, did you?... You've acted as if that was about all you
did remember."

"I've been very, _very_ nice to you!"

"But with a difference," he insisted resentfully. "Didn't you know I
must have written? You didn't think I wanted to let it stop there,
did you? You didn't think I meant that nonsense at tea----"

"Please don't go back to that," said the girl hurriedly. "We've been
good friends these three days without bringing it up--don't let us
do it now."

"Well, I don't enjoy thinking about it." His voice was sharp with
feeling. "You gave me the most miserable time of my life."

"I was very horrid."

"You told me you didn't give a _piastre_ for what I thought!"

"I said I didn't give half a _piastre_!" murmured Arlee
irrepressibly, with a wicked dimple.

Reluctantly he grinned. "Well?" he put to her questioningly.

"Well?"

Their eyes met, sparkling, combative.

"You do, don't you?"

"What?"

"You do give a _piastre_ for what I----"

"I'm afraid I do. I'm afraid I give a good many _piastres_ for what
everyone thinks." The girl's smile had suddenly faded; her eyes
lowered and sought the far horizons.

In the silence he came a little closer to her. "Then Arlee--Arlee,
dear----"

She started, and turned hurriedly. "We must go down----"

"Why must we?"

"They'll be waiting."

"Let 'em. They'll be glad of the chance if they can get away from
Emma.... I want to talk to you."

"I think Mr. Hill is quite as nice as Lady Claire," flashed Arlee in
a childish voice.

"Claire seems to agree with you." Falconer spoke lightly, but
underneath sounded the note of the disgruntled male ... resentful of
the defection of even the girls he left behind him. He added, with
his fatal gift of truculent expression, "But that's perfectly
absurd."

"Why absurd?" Arlee's voice held careful calm. The flash in her eyes
was hidden.

Falconer made a gesture of extreme exasperation. To waste these
precious moonlight moments in trifling debate was the very height of
maddening futility.

"Oh, the chap's a feather-headed adventurer. What's the use of
talking about him?... But that's aside the mark. I want----"

"You mustn't call him an adventurer!" The flash was far from hidden
now. Her wide eyes blazed challenge at the disconcerted young man.
"It's not fair. It's not true."

"Oh, I don't mean it in any--any _financial_ sense," the harassed
Falconer gave back. "But you can't expect me to take him seriously
after his exploits in Cairo? He's flighty. He goes off like a
rocket. He has illusions--but----"

"If you are going to slander him because of what he did for me--"
Arlee's voice was shaking.

"Oh, can't you see that's the key to his character!"

"Yes, I do see it." She sounded triumphant now. For a moment her
eves met his full of bright defiance; she hung fire, half scared,
then blazed into her revelation.

"_For I was in that palace._"

"What? What?" Falconer questioned in sheer vacancy of shock.

"I said--I was in that palace, Kerissen's palace."

"_What!_" came from him again, but now in twenty different
intonations, with absolute incredulity struggling for dominance.

Desperately she rushed on, her voice shaken but passionate.

"I tell you it is so. He got me there by a trick, a call upon his
sister. And he kept me by another trick, pretending a quarantine. I
was trapped there. The messages and all the Alexandria story were
Kerissen's frauds. He wanted to marry me. I'd have been there
to-night if it hadn't been for Billy Hill--that adventurer, as you
call him!"

It was impossible. It was unthinkable. Falconer stood staring down
at this girl whose white, upturned face, so amazingly ethereal and
childish, met his astounded gaze with unfaltering fixity, and from
his stiff lips dropped disjointed words and phrases, ejaculations of
denial, of disbelief.

She swept them utterly aside in her complete affirmation. "It's all
true--every bit."

"You--in that man's palace!" He was very pale, but into her white
face there surged a sudden flood of color, crimsoning it from brow
to throat.

"He didn't--hurt me," she stammered. "He was--quite mad--but he
didn't--hurt me."

She heard Falconer draw his breath with a queer, whistling sound. He
pushed back his hat and drew his hand over his forehead.

"It's--impossible," he persisted thickly, but there was bitter
relief in his voice. "The blackguard--the filthy blackguard!"

"Don't, don't, please don't! I can't bear to think of him. I've done
with even the thought of him.... He was trying to make me marry him.
I told you he was quite mad."

Sharply Falconer pulled himself together, in the tense effort to
meet this horrible astonishment like a man.

"And Hill got you out?"

"Yes.... He got me out."

"But the Evershams--they don't know----?"

"No, no, I've told no one. I'm not going to tell anyone. No one
knows of it but you and me--and Billy Hill."

"That's right." He drew another long breath, this time in sharp
relief. The color was coming back to his face, splotching it
unevenly. "You mustn't tell anyone. You don't know how a beastly
thing like that would spread. You mustn't let anyone have a hint.
Not even my sister."

Arlee's eyes were in shadow. Her voice came slowly. "They would
think so badly of me?"

"No--not of you--but it's the kind of thing, the impossible
things--A girl simply can't afford----"

"She can't afford to have even speculation against her," Arlee
finished quietly, but a little pulse in her throat was beating away
like mad. She knew he spoke the simple truth, but the taste of it
was bitter as gall to her mouth. However she had humbled herself in
secret self-communion, she had known no such shame as this.... She
felt cheapened ... tarnished....

"It's beastly--but she can't," he jerkily agreed, but with evident
relief at her sensible understanding. Perhaps he had remembered
Billy's fearful prophecy of the conversation with which the
adventure would supply her. "But of course nobody has a notion----"

"Not a notion. And I shan't give them any--not till I'm a
white-haired old lady in Mechlin caps, and _then_ I shall make up
for lost time by boring all my world with the story of my romantic
youth and the wild deeds done for me!" She laughed airily, pride
high in her face, hiding her secret hurts.

"And Hill got you out," Falconer repeated, with a sudden twinge of
jealous envy in his young voice. "He--he's a lucky one."

"_I'm_ the lucky one," Arlee flashed. "Think of the glorious luck
for me that sent him to paint there, outside the palace, where a
maid mistook him, and so gave a message. Why, it was a chance in a
million, in ten million--and it happened!"

"Happened?" Falconer looked at her a minute before continuing. Then
he asked quietly, "He told you that he just--happened--there?"

"Yes, he said by accident. He was painting----"

Now Falconer was an honest young man--and a gentleman. Deliberately
he brushed away his rival's generous subterfuge. "He doesn't paint,"
he told her. "He did that for an excuse--for a reason to stay
outside the palace. No chance directed it."

"Why, how--how did he know? Before----"

"He guessed. He was uneasy from the beginning--he made conjectures
and set himself to verify them."

After a moment, "I never knew--_that_!" said Arlee in slow wonder.

"Well, you know now," returned Falconer with a sense of grim justice
to the man he had belittled.

In the silence the girl moved toward the steps. He made a gesture to
stay her.

"You're not going--yet?"

"Yet?" she echoed, faintly mocking. "It's _hours_."

"But--but we can never see this again," he argued, weakly, parrying
with himself.

"We won't--forget it."

The words held a too-keen prophecy for him. He looked at her in
heart-beating uncertainty, and it seemed to him that all his future
was waiting on that moment. Should he speak? Should he utter that
which had been so near utterance when her astounding revelation had
stopped him?... After all, he knew nothing of her--but that she was
lovely and wilful and enchanting--with a capacity for risk--and a
dire disregard of consequences.... She was volatile, unstable,
bewildering--so he thought stiffeningly as he looked at her, but he
looked too long.

She was the very spirit of loveliness in the silver moon, her hair
a crown of light, her eyes deep with shadowy wistfulness, her lips
half sad, half tender.... He felt the blood burn hot in his face,
and took a quick step to bar the way.

"You must wait to hear what I was saying," he said, with a ring of
new command.

She gave him a sudden, startled look, and moved as if to pass him.

"You were saying--nothing," she answered proudly.

"I was saying--everything," he gave back incoherently. "Oh, Arlee,
do you think that story stops me! Don't you know--how much I want
you?" and with sudden vehemence he bent to clasp her in his arms.




CHAPTER XXIII

THE BETTER MAN


Down in the court of Rameses, Lady Claire and Hill were straying. A
most opportune old bachelor, passing with a party of acquaintances,
had diverted even Emma Falconer from her dragoning, and the young
English girl and her American escort were left for the time to their
own devices.

Not much was said. Claire, who had been fitfully gay all afternoon,
grew still as a church mouse now as they paced back and forth in the
shadows, stealing a slant glance from time to time at Billy's set
and silent face. She wondered a little at his absorption. But
chiefly she was thinking that she had never seen him look so
handsome ... with his brows knitted and his clear-cut lips pressed
sharply together ... but the boy of him somehow kept by that wilful
lock of black hair over his forehead.

To Billy it seemed that the bitterest drop of the cup was at his
lips. Those two--upon the pylon--were they never coming down? He was
waiting for them in every nerve, and yet he shrank from the look he
might read upon their faces. He thought, very grimly, that this
could mean but one thing, and that thing was the end forever and
ever, for him.... His heart was sick in him and he longed most
desperately to break away from these other women and the sham of
talk and dash off to dark solitude where the primitive man could
have his way, could tramp and fight and curse and sob and break his
heart in decent privacy. He faced with loathing the refinements of
torture which civilization imposes.

But the game had to be played. He was no quitter, he told himself
fiercely; he could stand up and take his punishment like a man. She
was not for him. He had loved her from the first, he had loved her
so that he had been clairvoyant to her peril, he had risked his neck
for her a dozen times and snatched her from a life that was a
death-in-life--and yet she was not for him. She was for a man who
had not believed in her danger, had not bestirred himself.... Black,
seething bitterness was boiling in Billy B. Hill. Darkly, through a
fog, he heard the outer man replying to some speech from the girl
beside him.

He understood, he told himself in a burst of despairing anguish, how
Kerissen could have plotted for her. Almost he longed to be a
scrupleless Oriental and carry her off across his saddle bow.... And
then he brought himself up short.

Was that all she meant to him, he asked himself with the sweat of
pain on his forehead beneath that black lock which was finding such
favor in Lady Claire's eyes--was that all she meant to him?--a prize
to be won? One man had tried to steal her; he had wished to _earn_
her--but she was a gift beyond all price and the giving lay in her
own heart alone.... And if Falconer was the man for her, then at
least he, Billy B. Hill, was man enough to stand up and be glad for
her and be humbly grateful to the end of his days that he had been
able to save her ... and give her her happiness. For it was really
he who had given it to her. And in that thought Billy Hill's young
heart expanded, and his soul stretched itself to such unwonted
heights that it seemed to push among the stars.

       *       *       *       *       *

"It is an unforgettable night," said the girl in the rose cloak.

He thought that was just the word for it, and a wryly humorous glint
was in the look he gave her. And he thought that she, too, was
playing the game mighty stanchly, and had been playing it bravely
these three days, since her conquering little rival had made her
reappearance. His heart warmed toward her in understanding and
compassion. They were comrades in affliction. He was not the only
one in the world who was not getting the heart's desire.

Aloud he answered, "And the last night for me."

Lady Claire looked up quickly. Her voice showed her struck with
sudden surprise. "You are going--so soon?"

"To-morrow."

"To Assouan?" Odd sharpness edged the question.

He waited a perceptible moment, though his resolution had been
taken. "Back to Cairo."

"Oh ... How long shall you be there?"

"Just till I get sailings. It's time for me to be off. I'm really a
working person, you know, not a playing one."

"You make bridges--and dams--and things, don't you?" she questioned
vaguely.

"Bridges--and dams--and things."

"Why don't you wait here for your sailings?" she asked impersonally
after another pause. "It's so _much_ more attractive here than
Cairo."

"I'd like to." He thought of next Friday--and Arlee's return--and
the masked ball. For a moment temptation urged. Then he threw back
his head with a gesture of decision. "But I can't. It's impossible."

Now Lady Claire did not know that he was thinking of next
Friday--and Arlee's return--and the masked ball. She only knew that
he spoke with a curious fierceness, and that his eyes were very
bright. And something in the girl, something strange and
acknowledged that had been so fitfully gay and light these three
days, quickened in mysterious excitement.

"Nothing is impossible," she gave back, "to a _man_!"

Billy thought she was resenting the conventions of the restricted
sex. She could not make any open advance toward Falconer while he,
as man, could make all the open advances to Arlee he was willing
to--but in this case his hands were tied. A man cannot inflict
himself upon a girl who may not feel herself free to reject him. He
laughed, with sorry ruefulness.

"There's a whole lot," he observed, "that is impossible to a man who
tries to be one," and then, oblivious of any construction she might
choose to put upon this cryptic utterance, he strolled moodily on,
in brooding silence.

After a pause, "Of course," said Lady Claire in so gentle a little
voice that it seemed to glide undisturbingly among his silent
meditations, "of course, a man has his--pride."

"I hope so," said the young man briefly. He understood her to be
probing for his reason for abandoning the chase; he understood that
for her own sake she would like to see him successful with Arlee,
and he was queerly sorry to be failing to help her there. But he had
done all that he could....

The girl spoke again, her face straight ahead, her shadowy eyes
staring out into the moonlight. "Is it--money?" she said in the same
little breath of a voice.

"Money!" Billy threw back the words in surprise, half contemptuous,
"Oh, Lord, no, it's not _money_! I haven't much of it _now_, but I'm
going to make a bunch of the stuff--if I want to." He spoke with
naïve and amazing confidence which somehow struck astounded belief
into the listener. "There's enough of it there, waiting to be
made--no, it's not money--though perhaps one might well think it
ought to be. I suppose my work might strike a girl as hard for her,"
he went on, considering aloud these problems of existence, "for it's
here to-day and there to-morrow--now doing a building in a roaring
city and now damming up some reservoir deep in the mountains--but it
always seemed to me that the girl who would like me would like that,
too. It's seeing so much of life--and such real life! Oh, no," he
said, and though a trace of doubt had struck into his voice, "that
in itself wouldn't be what I'd call impossible--not for the right
girl."

"But your work--would it always be in America?" said Lady Claire.

"Oh, always. It has to be, of course."

"Oh.... And--and--you--have to have--that work?"

"Why, of course, I have to have it!" Billy was bewildered, but
entirely positive. "That's _my_ work--the thing I'm made to do. _I_
couldn't earn my salt selling apartment houses."

"Oh, no, no," the girl hurriedly agreed.

A long, long silence followed, a silence in which he was entirely
oblivious to her imaginings. The moonlight lay heavy as dreams about
them; her thoughts went darting to and fro like fluttering
swallows.... She felt herself a stranger to herself.... She looked
up at him with a sudden deer-like lift of her head, and then looked
swiftly away.

"Don't go," she said in a quick, low voice. "Don't go--yet. Even
things that look impossible--can be made to come right."

He understood that she was pleading with him, partly for the sake of
her own chance with Falconer, but the sympathy flicked him on the
raw. He was sorry for her, sorry for the queer, strained look in her
face, sorry for the voice so full of feeling, but he couldn't do
anything to help her.

In silence he shook his head and was astounded at the look of sudden
proud anger she darted at him.

"You're a mighty real friend to take such an interest in my luck,"
he said quickly, with warm liking in his voice, "and I only wish you
could play fairy godmother and give me my wish--but you can't, Lady
Claire, and apparently _she_ won't, and that is the end of the
matter. I have to take off my hat to the Better Man."

Lady Claire did not gasp or stammer or question. She did none of the
dismayedly enlightening things into which a lesser poise might have
tottered. After an inconsiderable moment of silence she merely
uttered her familiar, "Oh!" and uttered it in a voice in which so
many things were blended that their elements could hardly be
perceived.

She added hurriedly, "I'm sorry if I've seemed to--to intrude into
your affairs."

"My affairs are on my sleeve," answered Billy and wondered at the
quick look she gave him.

"Oh, no--not at all," she answered a little breathlessly. "I'm sure
they haven't seemed so to me--but then I'm stupid." She stopped for
a moment of hot wonder at that stupidity. She had not believed Miss
Falconer--had thought her prejudiced ... maneuvering.... Like
lightning she reviewed the baffling interchange of sentences, then
glanced up at Billy's silent absorption. She felt queerly grateful
for his innocent density. "And perhaps _she's_ stupid, too," she
told him. "You'd better make sure. You'd better make absolutely
_sure_."

He looked down on her with sorry humor in his face. "Do I need to
make _surer_?" He nodded in the direction of the giant gateway.
"They've had time to settle the divisions of the Balkans up there."

"Oh, yes, they've had time!" She seemed speaking at sudden laughing
random. "But _we've_ had the same time and you see we haven't
settled anything with it--not even that you're to stay. Yes, you'd
better make _sure_, Mr. Hill."

Billy was hardly heeding. A laugh had caught his ears, a light high
laugh like the tinkle of a little silver bell through the darkness.
In the shadows behind them he made out a man and a woman arm in arm.

"Just a moment," he begged of Lady Claire. "May I leave you here a
moment? I must see those--I think I know----" Without listening to
her automatic permission he was gone.

The next moment he had laid his hand on the arm of the man with the
woman. Both spun quickly about. A babble of explanation broke out.

"_Ach, mein freund, mein freund_----"

"Oh, it is Billy----"

"How _gut_ to find you here----"

"Our American Billy."

The last voice, piquantly foreign, was the voice of Fritzi Baroff.
And the first voice gutterally foreign was the voice of Frederick
von Deigen. Arm in arm, flushed, happy, sentimental, the two began
talking in a breath, thanking Billy for the letter he had sent von
Deigen which had brought them together, and apologizing for their
hasty flight--"a honeymoon upon the Nile," the German joyfully
explained.

Discreetly Billy forbore to make any discoveries as to the exact
status of their "honeymoon." The German's face was very honestly
happy, and the little dancer was brimming with restless life and
vivacity.

"It was the picture in my watch--_hein_? The picture I carry night
and day," Frederick repeated in needless explanation, and was about
to draw out the picture when Billy restrained him.

He had a favor to ask. The American girl of Kerissen's palace had
escaped unharmed and returned to her friends who were ignorant of
all. She was this moment in the ruins. It would be a great shock to
her to meet Fritzi, to have Fritzi recognize her. On the morning she
would be gone. Would Fritzi----"

"Fritzi must disappear--for the night?" said the little Viennese
smiling wisely, but with a trace of cynicism. "The little American
must not be reminded--h'm? We will go.... For you have done so much
for me, you big, strange, platonic Mr. Billy!" Dazzlingly she smiled
on him, her dark eyes quizzically provocative.

"You're not at the Grand?"

"No, not that." She named another. "You come see me, when that girl
goes--h'm?"

Billy caught the German's eyes upon him, in their depths a faint
trouble, a vague appeal. He comprehended that the infatuated young
man had engaged in the tortuous business of keeping sparks from
tinder.

"I'm gone to-morrow," he replied.

"Maybe in Vienna?" went on the dancer. "We go soon--another day or
so maybe--and then back over the water to that life I left! Oh, my
God, how happy I am to go back to it all--to dance, to sing--Oh, I
could kiss you, Mr. Billy, if it would not make you so shock!" she
added with a malicious little laugh. "You know the news--about
_him_--h'm?"

"Him?"

"Kerissen--that devil fellow. He is in Cairo with a fever--in the
hospital there. A man who come from that hospital just tells
us--just by accident he tell us. A _bad_ fever, too!" She laughed in
satisfaction. "I hope he burn good and hard up," she added, with
energetic spite, "and teach him not to act like a wild man. That man
say he got a bad hand," she added, with a shrewd glance at Billy.

The young man merely grunted. "I hope he has," he replied. "It
matches the rest of him. Good night."

"Good night--for the now--h'm, Mr. Billy?" and with a quick little
clasp of his big hand and a gay little backward look the girl was
gone into the shadows upon the arm of her jealous cavalier.

Three people were waiting at the statue foot where he had left the
English girl.

"They've come at last, Mr. Hill," Lady Claire's voice struck very
gaily upon him, "and Miss Falconer has just come to tell us we must
see the colored lights in the great court--and then go home. So
hurry!"

She turned as she spoke and put her arm suddenly through Falconer's
who was standing next her. "Come on," she lightly commanded, and
promptly led the way.

That was something like a fairy godmother! Into Billy's eyes flashed
a warm light of gladness. Some moments out of that wretched evening
should yet be his own, bitter-sweet as they were in their sharp
finality.

He turned to the blue-cloaked figure at his side. "Do you like
colored fire?" he demanded. "Won't you come and see something
else--something I've wanted to see and to have you see with me? It's
near the way out. We can meet them at the pylon."

Of course she acquiesced. That was part of the cursed restraint
between them, he was reminded, to have her accept so obediently any
point-blank request of his. But for the nonce he was glad. He wanted
those few minutes desperately.

"What is it?" she murmured.

"I'll show you," and then, as he turned from the way they had come
and followed a winding path that dipped lower and lower between the
dune-like piles of sand, "It's the Sacred Lake," he explained.
"Perhaps you've seen it in the daytime--but I've been wanting to see
it at night."

"I think I just caught the glint of it from the pylon," she
observed.

"You had time to," said Billy, trying to twinkle down at her in
friendly fashion.

She did not twinkle back. She looked as suddenly guilty as a kitten
in the cream, and Billy's heart smote him heavily. He did not speak
again till they had rounded a corner and their path had brought them
out upon the shore of the Sacred Lake.

Like a little horseshoe it circled about three sides of the ruined
temple of the goddess Mut, inky-black and motionless with the stars
looking up uncannily like drowned lights from its still waters, and
inky-black and motionless, like guardian spirits about it, sat a
hundred cat-headed women of grim granite. It was a spot of stark
loneliness and utter silence, of ancient terror and desolate
abandonment; the solitude and the blackness and the aching age smote
upon the imagination like a heavy hand upon harp strings.

"Who are--they?" Arlee spoke in a hushed voice, as if the cat-headed
women were straining their ears.

"They're mysteries," said Billy, speaking in the same low tone.
"Generally they're said to be statues of the Goddess Pasht or
Sehket--but it's a riddle why the Amen-hotep person who built this
temple to the goddess Mut should have put Sehket here. Sehket is in
the trinity of Memphis--and Mut in that of Thebes. And so some
people say that this is not Pasht at all, but Mut herself, who was
sometimes represented as lion-headed. Between a giant cat and a
lion, you know, there's not much of difference."

"I like Pasht better than Mut," said Arlee decidedly.

"There you agree with Baedecker."

"What did Pasht do?"

"She was goddess of girls," said Billy, "and young wives. She got
the girls husbands and the wives--er--their requests. Girls used to
come down here at night and make a prayer to her and cast an
offering into the waters."

"And then they had their prayer?"

"Infallibly."

"I'd like a guardian like that," said Arlee, with a sudden
mischievous wistfulness that played the dickens with Billy's forces
of reserve. "Do you think she'd grant _my_ prayer?"

"Have you one to make?" said Billy, staring very hard for safety at
the monstrous images.

"They look as if they were coming alive," he added.

The moon had come up over an obstructing roof and now flashed down
upon them; a ripple of light began to swim across the star-eyes in
the inky waters; a finger of quicksilver seemed to be playing over
the scarred faces of the granite goddesses.

"They never died," said Arlee positively. "They're just waiting
their time. Can't you see they know all about us?... They
particularly know that you are the most deceiving young man they
ever saw! Why didn't you tell me you were shot in the arm?" she
finished rapidly.

"What?... Where did you hear that?"

"Mr. Falconer enlightened me."

"I wish Falconer would keep his stories to himself," said Billy
ungratefully. "It's just a----"

"Scratch," said Arlee promptly. "That's always a hero's word for
it."

Billy turned scarlet. He felt hot back to his ears.

"And why did you tell me that you _happened_ to be painting outside
the palace?" went on the unsparing voice. "You let me think it was
all accident--and it was all you, just _you_!"

"Good Lord," groaned Billy, effecting merriment over his
discomfiture, "Is there anything else he told you?... Look here, you
shouldn't have been talking about it," he said with sudden anxiety.

Arlee smiled. "It's all over," she said. "I told him everything."

Billy's heart missed a beat, and then hurried painfully to make up
for it. He felt a curious constriction in his throat. He tried to
think of something congratulatory to say and was lamentably silent.

"Why did you deceive me so?" she continued mercilessly. "Because my
gratitude was so _obnoxious_ to you? Were you so afraid I would
insist upon flinging more upon you?"

"That's a horrid word, obnoxious," said Billy painfully.

"I thought so," thrust in a pointed voice.

"I only meant," he slowly made out, "that a sense of--of obligation
is a stupid burden--and I didn't want you to feel you had to be any
more friendly to me than your heart dictated. That is all. It was
enough for me to remember that I had once been privileged to help
you."

"You--funny--Billy B. Hill person," said the voice in a very serious
tone. Billy continued staring at the unwinking old goddess ahead of
him. "You take it all so for granted," laughed Arlee softly, "As if
it were part of any day's work! I go about like a girl in a
dream--or a girl _with_ a dream ... a dream of fear, of old palaces
and painted women and darkened windows. It comes over me at night
sometimes. And then I wake and could go down on my knees to you....
I suppose there isn't any more danger from him?" she broke off to
half-whisper quickly.

"He's sick in the Cairo hospital," Billy made haste to inform her.
"I found out by accident. I understand he has a bad fever. So I
think he'll be up to no more tricks--and I'm out the satisfaction
of a little heart-to-heart talk."

"Oh, I told you you couldn't," she cried quickly. "You would make
him too angry. He isn't just--sane."

"Then all I have to do in Egypt is to hunt up my little Imp," said
Billy. "I must see the little chap again--before I go."

He waited--uselessly as he had foretold. She said nothing, and if
the glance he felt upon him was of inquiry he did not look about to
meet it. He was still staring a saturnine Pasht out of countenance.
There was a pause.

Then, "However were you able to think of it all?" said Arlee in slow
wonder. "However were you able to think such an impossible thought
as my imprisonment?"

"Because I was thinking about you," said Billy. Suddenly his tongue
ran away with him. "Incessantly," he added.

She looked up at him. Unguardedly he looked down at her. No one but
a blind girl or a goose could have mistaken that look upon Billy B.
Hill's young face, the frustrate longing of it, the deep desire. The
heart beneath the sky-blue cloak cast off a most monstrous
accumulation of doubts and fears and began suddenly to beat like
mad.

Totally unexpectedly, startlingly amazing, she flung out at him,
"Then what made you stop?"

"Stop?" he echoed. "Stop? I've never stopped! There hasn't been a
moment----"

"There have been three days. Three--horrible--days!"

"Arlee!"

"Do you think I _like_ being snubbed and ignored
and--and--obliterated?" she brought indignantly out. "Do you think I
call that--being friends?"

"I--I wanted to leave you free--not to force your friendship----" he
stammered wildly.

"You couldn't force _mine_," said Arlee Beecher.

"But--but there was Falconer," he protested. "You had to be free
to--to have a choice----"

"A choice? Do you call that a _choice_?"

"I thought you were making it. That first night----"

"I stayed up to dance with _you_," she cried hotly. "You never came
back!"

"But the next day----"

"I _wanted_ to go. But I couldn't keep up any more. I _had_ to
rest.... And you went with Lady Claire!"

"Why, I had to! We'd planned. But when we came back, he was on deck
with you----"

"Yes, and I was waiting up--to see _you_. And you only took two
dances that night----"

"You didn't seem to want me to----"

"I never guessed you wanted them! _I_ had my pride, too. I wasn't
going to be in the way--because you'd rescued me. I thought you
didn't want me in the way!"

"Arlee--my girl--my precious girl----"

"No, I'm not. I'm not."

"Yes, you are," he said fiercely. "I don't care if you are engaged
to Falconer or not, I'm going to tell you so."

"I'm not engaged to Falconer," she protested.

He blurted in bewilderment. "Then what in the world were you doing
up there on that pylon?"

Her elfish laughter disconcerted him. "Do you think one has to get
engaged if she stays on a pylon?... We were getting _not_ engaged."

"I thought--I thought you liked him," he said bewilderedly.

"I did. I do, I mean--but not that way. He--he--Oh, I really _like_
him," she cried tremulously, "but not--we've had it all out and
everything's all over. I'm sorry--sorry--but he'll be really glad
bye and bye. For my story shocked him terribly.... And then there's
Lady Claire. He didn't like to have her down with you even when he
was up with me." She laughed softly. "Oh, I shouldn't have let him
be so friendly here but I did like him and you--you were so--so
hateful."

The moon and stars whirled giddily around him as he put his arms
about her. Like a man in a dream he drew her to him.

"I love you--love you," he said huskily over the bright maze of
hair.

"You don't!" came with muffled intensity from the hidden lips. "You
said to that man--when I was in that cave--'Nothing doing!'"

"It wasn't his affair--I hadn't a hope.... Oh, my dear, my dear,
I've been breaking my heart----"

"And I've had such a perfectly h-hateful three days," sobbed the
voice.

His arms closed tighter about her, incredible of their happiness.

"Oh, Arlee, I can't tell you--I haven't words----"

"I've had _deeds_!" she whispered.

Through his rocking mind darted a memory of her earlier speech to
him. "You said you didn't want words. Arlee--_will you_?"

She flung back her head and looked up at him, her face a flower, her
eyes like stars tangled in the bright mist of her hair.

"Billy, what's your middle name?"

"Bunker.... I can't help it, dear. They wished it on me and asked me
not to let it go. But _Bunker Hill_----!"

"It's a wonderful name, Billy! A perfectly irresistible name!" Her
eyes laughed up at him through a dazzle of tears, and prankishly
over her curving lips hovered a mischievous dimple. "It's a
name--that--I--simply--can't--do--without--Billy Bunker Hill!"

The dimple deepened then fled before its just deserts. For if ever a
dimple deserved to be caught and kissed that was the one.







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