mingled with the crowd. But the niche was deserted
as a rifled nest. Then his eyes spied the door that the green
decorations had conspired to hide and he wrenched it open.

He found himself on a little balcony overlooking the hotel garden.
He knew the place in daytime--palms and shrubs and a graveled walk
and painted chairs where he had drunk tea with Jinny and watched a
Russian tourist beautifully smoking cigarettes.

Now the place was strange. Night and a crescent moon had wrought
their magic, and the garden was a mystery of velvet dusks and ivory
pallors. The graveled path ran glimmering beneath the magnolias.
Over the wall's blankness the eucalyptus defined its crooked lines
against the blue Egyptian sky.

No living thing was there ... nothing ... or did that shadow stir?
There, just at the path's end.

Ryder's lithe strength was swift. There was one breathless moment of
pursuit, then his hand fell with gripping fierceness upon the
huddled dark figure that had sped so frantically to the tiny door in
the garden's end.... A moment more and she would have been through.

His hand on her shoulder turned her towards him. Her eyes met his
with a dash of desperation.... He was unconscious how his own were
blazing ... how queerly white his face had gone under its desert
brown.

She was actually running away. She had meant never to see him again.
He had frustrated her, but the blow she had meant to deal him was
still felt.

His voice, when it came, sounded shaken.

"You were going to leave me?"

Strangely her eyes changed. The defiance, the panic fear, faded. A
cloud of slow despair welled up in them.

"What else?" she said very softly.

He did not lose his hold on her. He drew her back into the shadows
with involuntary caution, and he felt her slender body trembling in
his grasp. The tremors seemed to pass into his own.

A sense of urgency was pressing upon him. He was not himself, not
any self that he had known. He stood there, in the Egyptian night,
in the motley of a Scotch chieftain, grasping this mysterious
creature of the masquerade, and he heard a voice that he did not
know ask of her again and again, "But why? Why? Why were you going?"

It was not, he was telling himself, and her eyes were telling him,
as if she wanted to go. He knew what he knew.... Those had been
enchanted hours.... Yet she had deceived and fled from him.

Her eyes looked darkly back at him through the dusk.

"Because I must re