's name--tells of her home life to my sister.
One thing she did was to serve a beautiful foreign lady in the house of
a rich Arab. She was only a child then, not more than thirteen, for such
girls grow up early; but she has always thought about that lady, who was
good to her, and very sad. Mouni told Josette she had never seen any one
so beautiful, and that her mistress had hair of a natural colour, redder
than hair dyed with henna and powdered with gold dust. It was this
describing of the hair which brought the story back to my head when Miss
Ray had gone, because she has hair like that, and perhaps her sister had
it too."

"By Jove, we'll run over to Tlemcen in the car, and see that Kabyle
girl," Nevill eagerly proposed, carefully looking at his friend, and not
at Jeanne Soubise. But she raised her eyebrows, then drew them together,
and her frank manner changed. With that shadow of a frown, and smileless
eyes and lips, there was something rather formidable about the handsome
young woman.

"Mees Ray may like to manage all her own beesiness," she remarked. And
it occurred to Stephen that it would be a propitious moment to choose
such curios as he wished to buy. In a few moments Mademoiselle Soubise
was her pleasant self again, indicating the best points of the things he
admired, and giving him their history.

"There's apparently a conspiracy of silence to keep us from finding out
anything about Miss Ray's sister as Ben Halim's wife," he said to Nevill
when they had left the curiosity-shop. "Also, what has become of Ben
Halim."

"You'll learn that there's always a conspiracy of silence in Africa,
where Arabs are concerned," Nevill answered. There was a far-off, fatal
look in his eyes as he spoke, those blue eyes which seemed at all times
to see something that others could not see. And again the sense of an
intangible, illusive, yet very real mystery of the East, which he had
felt for a moment before landing, oppressed Stephen, as if he had
inhaled too much smoke from the black incense of Tombouctou.

XI

Stephen and Nevill Caird were in the cypress avenue when Victoria Ray
drove up in a ramshackle cab, guided by an Arab driver who squinted
hideously. She wore a white frock which might have cost a sovereign, and
had probably been made at home. Her wide brimmed hat was of cheap straw,
wound with a scarf of thin white muslin; but her eyes looked out like
blue stars from under its dove-coloured shadow, and a l