“I should advise you to let me go at once,” repeated Jill, “if you don’t want my friends to raise trouble!”

But her bluff was of no avail as she was soon aware when once more the man salaamed with a world of mockery in the action.

“But Mademoiselle has but now run away from her friends!  No?—­she has but little—­oh! very little money!—­yes?—­and nowhere to go—­it is for that that I have thrown my protection around her!”

Jill thought hard for a moment, wondering how much the man knew of her escapade.

“How do you know?  Who told you I had no money?   I have a friend as
it happens------!”

“Mademoiselle has no friend but me,” interrupted the man; “she left them at the hotel when she went to take a walk.”

And Jill retreated step by step before him as he came closer still, his voice sinking to a whisper, his hand within an inch of her wrist.

“I will not harm you because you are oh, very beautiful!  You are a feast of loveliness and I—­I am hungry!”

But still the little smile twisted the corner of Jill’s red mouth as she looked unflinchingly into the brown eyes in the depths of which smouldered a something which was not good to look upon.

“I suppose you have stolen my dressing-case too,” was her next, somewhat irrelevant remark.  “Men of your type I dare say can find a use for everything from women to hair-pins.  You black dog, who are you?”

Red murder flared in the room for one moment and then died down, leaving a little smoke cloud of uncertainty in the man’s mind.

He was used—­oh, very used to the breaking in of women, for was not his name notorious in Northern Egypt and were there not whispers of many young and beautiful who had mysteriously disappeared.

Were not men and women in his pay in every corner of the big cities posing as honest individuals?  And was he not in direct communication with them?  And had he not a coterie of jackal friends who hunted with him, though of a truth not half so successfully or artistically as he?

And yet this slip of a girl, this pale white blossom, held him at bay, more by her seeming indifference to the fate before her than by any effort of will she made to combat the danger.

Blase to tears of the exquisite women of his own country with their lustrous brown eyes, marvellous languorous figures, and well-trained, inherited ideas on love, the man was violently attracted by the whiteness of this girl allied to her indifferent manner and an intense virility which seemed to envelop her from head to foot.

True, there are natives of a white and surpassing beauty, but which whiteness when compared to the genuine colouring of a very fair Englishwoman has the same effect on the purchaser or temporary owner as would a white sapphire bought in mistake for a diamond.