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 wa