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