d, and the inexplicable mystery of a service in a Roman Catholic
church.

"We shall never understand!" she sighed.

They had walked some way and it was now night, but they could see a
large iron gate a little way farther down the road on their left.

"Do you mean to go right up to the hotel?" Helen asked.

Rachel gave the gate a push; it swung open, and, seeing no one about and
judging that nothing was private in this country, they walked straight
on. An avenue of trees ran along the road, which was completely
straight. The trees suddenly came to an end; the road turned a corner,
and they found themselves confronted by a large square building. They
had come out upon the broad terrace which ran round the hotel and were
only a few feet distant from the windows. A row of long windows opened
almost to the ground. They were all of them uncurtained, and all
brilliantly lighted, so that they could see everything inside. Each
window revealed a different section of the life of the hotel. They drew
into one of the broad columns of shadow which separated the windows and
gazed in. They found themselves just outside the dining-room. It was
being swept; a waiter was eating a bunch of grapes with his leg across
the corner of a table. Next door was the kitchen, where they were
washing up; white cooks were dipping their arms into cauldrons, while
the waiters made their meal voraciously off broken meats, sopping up the
gravy with bits of crumb. Moving on, they became lost in a plantation
of bushes, and then suddenly found themselves outside the drawing-room,
where the ladies and gentlemen, having dined well, lay back in
deep arm-chairs, occasionally speaking or turning over the pages of
magazines. A thin woman was flourishing up and down the piano.

"What is a dahabeeyah, Charles?" the distinct voice of a widow, seated
in an arm-chair by the window, asked her son.

It was the end of the piece, and his answer was lost in the general
clearing of throats and tapping of knees.

"They're all old in this room," Rachel whispered.

Creeping on, they found that the next window revealed two men in
shirt-sleeves playing billiards with two young ladies.

"He pinched my arm!" the plump young woman cried, as she missed her
stroke.

"Now you two--no ragging," the young man with the red face reproved
them, who was marking.

"Take care or we shall be seen," whispered Helen, plucking Rachel by the
arm. Incautiously her head had risen to the m