athetic,
self-indulgent, corpulent old Mussulmans riding in state, accompanied by
their pipe-bearers, or sitting half-asleep in coffee-houses or at the doors
of their shops. Now and again a bevy of Turkish ladies glided by: mere
peripatetic bundles of white linen, closely-veiled and yellow-slippered; or
a Greek in his white petticoat, fierce in aspect and armed to the teeth; or
an Armenian merchant, Arnauts, Bashi-Bazouks, French Spahis, the Bedouins
of the desert, but half-disguised as civilised troops, while occasionally
there appeared, amidst the heterogeneous throng, the plain suit of grey
dittoes worn by the travelling Englishman, or the more or less simple
female costumes that hailed from London or Paris.

Misseri's hotel did a roaring trade. It was crowded from roof-tree to
cellar. Rooms cost a fabulous price. Mrs. Wilders managed to be very
comfortably lodged there notwithstanding.

She still lingered in Constantinople. Her anxiety for her husband
forbade her to leave the East, although she told her friends it was
misery for her to be separated from her infant boy. She might have
had a passage home in a dozen different steamers returning empty, all
of them in search of fresh freights of men or material; or there was
Lord Lydstone's yacht still lying in the Golden Horn and ready to take
her anywhere if only she said the word. But that, of course, was out
of the question, as she had laughingly told her husband's cousin more
than once when he had placed the _Arcadia_ at her disposal.

They met sometimes, but never on board the yacht, for that would have
outraged Mrs. Wilders's nice sense of propriety. It was generally at
Scutari, where poor young Anastasius Wilders lay hovering between life
and death, for Mrs. Wilders, with cousinly kindliness, came frequently
to the wounded lad's bedside.

She was bound for the other side of the Bosphorus as she went
downstairs one fine morning towards the end of October, dressed, as
usual, to perfection.

A man met her as she crossed the threshold, a man dressed like, and
with the air of, an Englishman--a pale-faced, sandy-haired man, with
white eyebrows, rather prominent cheek-bones, and a retreating chin.

"Good morning, my dear madam." He spoke with just the faintest accent,
betraying that English was not his native tongue. "Like a good Sister,
going to the hospital again?"

Mrs. Wilders bowed, and, with heightened colour, sought to pass
hastily on.

"What! not one w