lilies in the white garden to a supernatural pallor. The room, with its
embroidered Moorish hangings, darkened to a rich gloom; but Mohammed
touched a button on the wall, and all the quaint old Arab lamps that
stood in corners, or hung suspended from the cedar roof, flashed out
cunningly concealed electric lights. At the same moment, there began a
great howling outside the door. Mohammed sprang to open it, and in
poured a wave of animals. Stephen hastily counted five dogs; a collie, a
white deerhound, a Dandy Dinmont, and a mother and child of unknown
race, which he afterwards learned was Kabyle, a breed beloved of
mountain men and desert tent-dwellers. In front of the dogs bounded a
small African monkey, who leaped to the back of Nevill's chair, and
behind them toddled with awkward grace a baby panther, a mere ball of
yellow silk.

"They don't like the thunder, poor dears," Nevill apologised. "That's
why they howled, for they're wonderfully polite people really. They
always come at the end of lunch. Aunt Caroline won't invite them to
dinner, because then she sometimes wears fluffy things about which she
has a foolish vanity. The collie is Angus's. The deerhound is Hamish's.
The dandy is hers. The two Kabyles are Mohammed's, and the flotsam and
jetsam is mine. There's a great deal more of it out of doors, but this
is all that gets into the dining-room except by accident. And I expect
you think we are a very queer family."

Stephen did think so, for never till now had he been a member of a
household where each of the servants was allowed to possess any animals
he chose, and flood the house with them. But the queerer he thought the
family, the better he found himself liking it. He felt a boy let out of
school after weeks of disgrace and punishment, and, strangely enough,
this old Arab palace, in a city of North Africa seemed more like home to
him than his London flat had seemed of late.

When Lady MacGregor rose and said she must write the note she had
promised Nevill to send Miss Ray, Stephen longed to kiss her. This form
of worship not being permitted, he tried to open the dining-room door
for her to go out, but Angus and Hamish glared upon him so
superciliously that he retired in their favour.

The luncheon hour, even when cloaked in the mysterious gloom of a
thunderstorm, is no time for confidences; besides, it is not conducive
to sustained conversation to find a cold nose in your palm, a baby claw
up your sleeve,