n, there are no ghosts here that will hurt him. And then we'll have
lunch, for which he's starving."

Stephen's quarters consisted of a bedroom (furnished in Tunisian style,
with an imposing four-poster of green and gold ornamented with a gilded,
sacred cow under a crown) and a sitting room gay with colourful
decorations imported from Morocco. These rooms opened upon a wide
covered balcony screened by a carved wooden lattice and from the
balcony Stephen could look over hills, near and far, dotted with white
villas that lay like resting gulls on the green wave of verdure which
cascaded down to join the blue waves of the sea. Up from that far
blueness drifted on the wind a murmurous sound like AEolian harps,
mingled with the tinkle of fairy mandolins in the fountain of the court
below.

At luncheon, in a dining-room that opened on to a white-walled garden
where only lilies of all kinds grew, to Stephen's amazement two
Highlanders in kilts stood behind his hostess's chair. They were young,
exactly alike, and of precisely the same height, six foot two at least.
"No, you are not dreaming them, Mr. Knight," announced Lady MacGregor,
evidently delighted with the admiring surprise in the look he bestowed
upon these images. "And you're quite right. They _are_ twins. I may as
well break it to you now, as I had to do to Nevill when he invited me to
come to Algiers and straighten out his housekeeping accounts: they play
Ruth to my Naomi. Whither I go, they go also, even to the door of the
bathroom, where they carry my towels, for I have no other maid than
they."

Stephen could not help glancing at the two giants, expecting to see some
involuntary quiver of eye or nostril answer electrically to this frank
revelation of their office; but their countenances (impossible to think
of as mere faces) remained expressionless as if carved in stone. Lady
MacGregor took nothing from Mohammed and the other Kabyle servant who
waited on Nevill and Stephen. Everything for her was handed to one of
the Highlanders, who gravely passed on the dish to their mistress. If
she refused a _plat_ favoured by them, instead of carrying it away, the
giants in kilts silently but firmly pressed it upon her acceptance,
until in self-defence she seized some of the undesired food, and ate it
under their watchful eyes.

During the meal a sudden thunderstorm boiled up out of the sea: the sky
became a vast brazen bowl, and a strange, coppery twilight bleached the