And remember, my dear Jack, that the legation has no desire to
alienate the affections of influential Turks, or criticize
fifteen-years-ago romances. You have a totally wrong impression of
the responsibilities of foreign representatives."

"But to let him dispose of a French girl--"

"He is disposing of her, as his daughter, in honorable marriage to a
wealthy and aristocratic general. There can be no question of his
motives--"

"Of course, if you think that sort of thing is all right--"

Carefully McLean ignored the other's wrath.

Patiently he explained. "It's not what I think, my dear fellow, it's
what the legation thinks. There's not a chance in the world of
getting the marriage stopped."

"Then I'll do it myself," declared Ryder. "I'll see this Tewfick
Pasha and talk to him. Tell him the money is to come to the girl
only when she is single. Tell him the French law gives the father's
representatives full charge. Tell him that he kidnapped the mother
and the government will prosecute unless the girl is given her
liberty. Tell him anything. A man with a guilty conscience can
always be bluffed."

In silence McLean gazed upon him, perplexed and clouded, his
quizzical twinkle gone. Jack was taking this thing infernally to
heart.... And it was a bad business.

"You will let me do the telling," he stated at last, grimly. "What
can be said, I'll say. Like a fool, I will meddle."

And so it happened that within another hour two very stiff and
constrained young men were ringing the bell at the entrance door of
Tewfick Pasha.

CHAPTER VIII

TEWFICK RECEIVES

A huge Soudanese admitted them. They found themselves in a tiled
vestibule, looking through open arches into the green of a
garden--that garden, Ryder hardly needed to remind himself, with
whose back door he had made such unconventional acquaintance.

Now he had a glimpse of a sunny fountain and fluttering pigeons,
and, on either side of the garden, of the two wings of the building,
gay white walls with green shutters more suggestive of a French
villa than an Egyptian palace, before the Soudanese marshaled them
toward the stairs upon the right.

The left, then, was the way to the haremlik. And somewhere in those
secluded rooms, to which no man but the owner of the palace ever
gained admission, was Aimee.

The Soudanese mounted the stairs before them and held open a door
into a long drawing-room from which the pasha's modernity had
stripped eve