ecome of her?"

The Police Commissioner did not answer at once, but glanced up at
Holcombe from under his half-shut eyes with a look in which there was
a mixture of curiosity and of amusement. "You don't mean to say, Mr.
Holcombe," he began, slowly, with the patronage of the older man and
with a touch of remonstrance in his tone, "that you're _still_
with the husband in that case?"

Holcombe looked coldly over Mr. Meakim's head. "I have only a purely
professional interest in any one of them," he said. "They struck me as
a particularly nasty lot. Good-morning, sir."

"Well," Meakim called after him, "you needn't see nothing of them if
you don't want to. You can get rooms to yourself."

Holcombe did get rooms to himself, with a balcony overlooking the bay,
and arranged with the proprietor of the Albion to have his dinner
served at a separate table. As others had done this before, no one
regarded it as an affront upon his society, and several people in the
hotel made advances to him, which he received politely but coldly. For
the first week of his visit the town interested him greatly,
increasing its hold upon him unconsciously to himself. He was restless
and curious to see it all, and rushed his guide from one of the few
show-places to the next with an energy which left that fat Oriental
panting.

[Illustration: Stopping for half-hours at a time before a bazaar.]

But after three days Holcombe climbed the streets more leisurely,
stopping for half-hours at a time before a bazaar, or sent away his
guide altogether, and stretched himself luxuriously on the broad wall
of the fortifications. The sun beat down upon him, and wrapped him
into drowsiness. From far afield came the unceasing murmur of the
market-place and the bazaars, and the occasional cries of the priests
from the minarets; the dark blue sea danced and flashed beyond the
white margin of the town and its protecting reef of rocks where the
sea-weed rose and fell, and above his head the buzzards swept heavily,
and called to one another with harsh, frightened cries. At his side
lay the dusty road, hemmed in by walls of cactus, and along its narrow
length came lines of patient little donkeys with jangling necklaces,
led by wild-looking men from the farm-lands and the desert, and women
muffled and shapeless, with only their bare feet showing, who looked
at him curiously or meaningly from over the protecting cloth, and
passed on, leaving him startled and wondering