Desperately he thought of remedying this defect.  There were several charming young matrons not averse to devoted young men, but the time was short for establishing those confidential relations which were what he required now.

Jinny Jeffries would do it for him if she could, but Jinny would not return for another week.  And if she changed her mind and took the boat back—­as he, alack! had advised—­instead of the express, then she would be longer.

And meanwhile the days were passing, four of them now since he and McLean had heard the Soudanese locking the door behind them.

There seemed nothing for it but to trust to that idea which had been slowly shaping in his mind.

CHAPTER IX

A WEDDING PRESENT

In a room high in the palace a young girl was trying on a frock.  Before a tall pier glass she stood indifferently, one hip sagging to the despair of the kneeling seamstress, her face turned listlessly from the image in the glass.

Through the open window, banded with three bars, she looked into the rustling tops of palms, from which the yellow date fruit hung, and beyond the palms the hot, bright, blue sky and the far towers of a minaret.

“A bit more to the left, h’if you please, miss,” the woman entreated through a mouthful of pins, and apathetically the young figure moved.

“A bit of h’all right, now, that drape,” the woman chirped, sitting back on her heels to survey her work.

She was an odd gnome-like figure, with a sharp nose on one side of her head and an outstanding knob of hair on the other.  Into that knob the thin locks were so tightly strained that her pointed features had an effect of popping out of bondage.

She was London born, brought out by an English official’s wife as dressmaker to the children, remaining in Cairo as wife of a British corporal.  Since no children had resulted to require her care and the corporal maintained his distaste for thrift, Mrs. Hendricks had resumed her old trade, and had become a familiar figure to many fashionable Turkish harems, slipping in and out morning and evening, sewing busily away behind the bars upon frocks that would have graced a court ball, and lunching in familiar sociability with the family, sometimes having a bey or a captain or a pasha for a vis-a-vis when the men in the family dropped in for luncheon.

As the girl did not turn her head she looked for approbation to the third person in the room, a tall, severely handsome Frenchwoman in black, whose face had the beauty of chiseled marble and the same quality of cold perfection.  This was Madame de Coulevain, teacher of French and literature to the jeunes filles of Cairo, former governess of Aimee, returned now to her old room in the palace for the wedding preparations.

There was history behind madame’s sculptured face.  In an incredibly impulsive youth she had fled from France with a handsome captain of Algerian dragoons; after a certain matter at cards he had ceased to be a captain and became petty official in a Cairo importing house; later yet, he became an invalid.