struggle in the stateroom; he even seemed
to hear the sound of the shot, to see the Spaniard, drenched with blood
from a wound in his forehead, to hear his cry:

"I cannot see! I cannot see! Mother of Mercy! I have lost my sight!"

It had broken Grantham. The scandal was hushed up, but retirement was
inevitable. He knew, too, that the light had gone out of the world for
him as it had gone for Miguel da Mura.

It is sometimes thus that a scallywag is made.

IV

THE STAR OF EGYPT

As Grantham went out by the side door, Hassan, soft of foot, appeared.
Crossing to the main door he opened it and walked down the narrow
corridor beyond. Presently came the tap, tap, tap of a stick and a sound
of muttered conversation in some place below.

Hassan reentered and went in through the curtained doorway to summon
Agapoulos. Agapoulos was dressing and would not be disturbed. Hassan
went back to those who waited, but ere long returned again chattering
volubly to himself. Going behind the carven screen he rapped upon the
door of Zahara's room, and she directed him to come in. To Zahara,
Hassan was no more than a piece of furniture, and she thought as little
of his intruding while she was in the midst of her toilet as another
woman would have thought of the entrance of a maid.

"Two men," reported Hassan, "who won't go away until they see somebody."

"Whom do they want to see?" she inquired indifferently, adjusting the
line of her eyebrow with an artistically pointed pencil.

"They say whoever belongs here."

Zahara invariably spoke either French or English to natives, and if
Hassan had addressed her in Arabic she would not have replied, although
she spoke that language better than she spoke any other.

"What are they like? Not--police?"

"Foreign," replied Hassan vaguely.

"English--American?"

"No, not American or English. Very black hair, dark skin."

Zahara, a student of men, became aware of a mild interest. These swarthy
visitors should prove an agreeable antidote to the poisonous calm of
Harry Grantham. She was trying with all the strength of her strange,
stifled soul not to think of Grantham, and she was incapable of
recognizing the fact that she could think of nothing else and had
thought of little else for a long time past. Even now it was because of
him that she determined to interview the foreign visitors. The mystery
of her emotions puzzled her more than ever.

She descended to a small, barely fu