owing:

Borrowed your Rolls. Urgent. Will explain tomorrow. Apologize. N.B.

CHAPTER XXIII. PHIL ABINGDON'S VISITOR

On the following morning the card of His Excellency Ormuz Khan was
brought to Phil Abingdon in the charming little room which Mrs.
McMurdoch had allotted to her for a private sanctum during the period of
her stay under this hospitable roof.

"Oh," she exclaimed, and looked at the maid in a startled way. "I
suppose I must see him. Will you ask him to come in, please?"

A few moments later Ormuz Khan entered. He wore faultless morning dress,
too faultless; so devoid of any flaw or crease as to have lost its
masculine character. In his buttonhole was a hyacinth, and in one
slender ivory hand he carried a huge bunch of pink roses, which, bowing
deeply, he presented to the embarrassed girl.

"Dare I venture," he said in his musical voice, bending deeply over her
extended hand, "to ask you to accept these flowers? It would honour me.
Pray do not refuse."

"Your excellency is very kind," she replied, painfully conscious of
acute nervousness. "It is more than good of you."

"It is good of you to grant me so much pleasure," he returned,
sinking gracefully upon a settee, as Phil Abingdon resumed her seat.
"Condolences are meaningless. Why should I offer them to one of your
acute perceptions? But you know--" the long, magnetic eyes regarded her
fixedly--"you know what is in my heart."

Phil Abingdon bit her lip, merely nodding in reply.

"Let us then try to forget, if only for a while," said Ormuz Khan. "I
could show you so easily, if you would consent to allow me, that those
we love never leave us."

The spell of his haunting voice was beginning to have its effect. Phil
Abingdon found herself fighting against something which at once repelled
and attracted her. She had experienced this unusual attraction before,
and this was not the first time that she had combated it. But whereas
formerly she had more or less resigned herself to the strange magic
which lay in the voice and in the eyes of Ormuz Khan, this morning there
was something within her which rebelled fiercely against the Oriental
seductiveness of his manner.

She recognized that a hot flush had covered her cheeks. For the image
of Paul Harley, bronzed, gray-eyed, and reproachful, had appeared before
her mind's eye, and she knew why her resentment of the Persian's charm
of manner had suddenly grown so intense. Yet she was not wholly immune