way, at least. Don't you
think that is a good sign?" he asked, eagerly.

"It depends on what you call a 'good sign,'" said Miss Morris,
judicially. "It is a sign you're good to look at, if that's what you
want. But you probably know that already, and it's nothing to your
credit. It certainly isn't a sign that a person cares for you because
she prefers to look at your profile rather than at what the dragomans
are trying to show her."

Carlton drew himself up stiffly. "If you knew your ALICE better," he
said, with severity, "you would understand that it is not polite to
make personal remarks. I ask you, as my confidante, if you think she
has noticed me, and you make fun of my looks! That's not the part of a
confidante."

"Noticed you!" laughed Miss Morris, scornfully. "How could she help
it? You are always in the way. You are at the door whenever they go
out or come in, and when we are visiting mosques and palaces you are
invariably looking at her instead of the tombs and things, with a
wistful far-away look, as though you saw a vision. The first time you
did it, after you had turned away I saw her feel to see if her hair was
all right. You quite embarrassed her."

"I didn't--I don't!" stammered Carlton, indignantly. "I wouldn't be so
rude. Oh, I see I'll have to get another confidante; you are most
unsympathetic and unkind." But Miss Morris showed her sympathy later in
the day, when Carlton needed it sorely; for the dinner towards which he
had looked with such pleasurable anticipations and lover-like
misgivings did not take place. The Sultan, so the equerry informed
him, had, with Oriental unexpectedness, invited the Duke to dine that
night at the Palace, and the Duke, much to his expressed regret, had
been forced to accept what was in the nature of a command. He sent
word by his equerry, however, that the dinner to Mr. Carlton was only a
pleasure deferred, and that at Athens, where he understood Carlton was
also going, he hoped to have the pleasure of entertaining him and
making him known to his sisters.

"He is a selfish young egoist," said Carlton to Mrs. Downs. "As if I
cared whether he was at the dinner or not! Why couldn't he have fixed
it so I might have dined with his sisters alone? We would never have
missed him. I'll never meet her now. I know it; I feel it. Fate is
against me. Now I will have to follow them on to Athens, and something
will turn up there to keep me away from her.