alon. French were the shirred, silk shades upon
the electric lamps, French the music upon the chic rosewood piano.

And then, as if some careless property man had overlooked them in
changing the act, two window balconies of closely carved old wood,
of solidly screening mashrubiyeh wood, jutted out from one
cream-tinted wall, and above a gilded sofa, upholstered in the
delicate fabric of the Rue de la Paix, hung a green satin banner
embroidered in silver with a phrase from the Koran.

Tewfick Pasha was at one side of the room, filling his match case.
He was in evening dress, a ribbon of some order across a rather
swelling shirt bosom, a red fez upon his dark head.

At his daughter's entrance he turned quickly, with so sharp a gleam
from his full, somewhat protuberant black eyes that her guilty heart
fairly turned over in her.

It made matters no more comforting to have Miriam packed from the
room.

She would deny it all, she thought desperately ... No, she would
admit it, and implore his indulgence.... She would admit nothing but
the garden.... She would admit the ball.... She would _never_ admit
the young man....

With conscious eyes and flushing cheeks, woefully aware of
dew-drenched satin slippers and an upsettingly hammering heart,
Aimee presented the young image of irresolute confusion.

To her surprise there was no outburst. Her father was suddenly gay
and smiling, with a flow of pleasant phrases that invited her
affection. In his good humor--and Tewfick Pasha liked always to be
kept in good humor--he had touches of that boyish charm that had
made him the _enfant gate_ of Paris and Vienna as well as Cairo and
Constantinople. An _enfant_ no more, in the robustly rotund forties,
his cheerful self-indulgence demanded still of his environment that
smiling acquiescence that kept life soft and comfortable.

And now it suddenly struck Aimee, through her tense alarm, that his
smile was not a spontaneous smile, but was silently, uneasily asking
his daughter not to make something too unpleasant for him ... that
something that had brought him here, at an unprecedented midnight
... that had kept him waiting until she, supposedly, should rise and
dress....

If it were not then a knowledge of her escapade--?

The relief from that fear made everything else bearable. She was
even able to entertain, with a certain welcome, the alternative
alarm that he had decided to marry again--that nightmare from whose
realization