She made a few choice remarks upon the undoubted inclusion of a pig in the commissionaire’s parentage, in a curiously sibilant voice, then limped away with a distressing swing of her body from the hips.

“Can’t you keep those people quiet?” Kelham demanded angrily, as he moved a chair further back, and lit a cigarette.

An hour had passed, in which he had come to no decision, when Fate, in the shape of a page-boy, offered him the just-arrived, local morning paper, which he took and read, with only half a mind upon the gossipy contents.

“By Jove!” he suddenly exclaimed.  “If that isn’t a bit of luck!  Here’s the very excuse for getting down there without kind of thrusting myself upon them.”  He flattened out the paper and again read through the paragraph which gave a most extraordinarily detailed account of the immensely wealthy Hugh Carden Ali, his career at Harrow; his travels; his stables in the desert; his birds and a hundred and one other details calculated to interest those who like reading about other people’s most intimate affairs.  It ended:  “. . .  Being a great sportsman, the strange story of lion which is causing such uneasiness and is likely to do harm to the Luxor season, has taken him to his Tents of Purple and Gold, one of the wonders of modern Egypt and which lie in the desert a little distance from the well-known Colossi.”

He did not frown this time as he folded the paper and turned to watch the commissionaire in conclave with a coal-black Ethiopian who, clad in crimson tunic, enormous turban and with scimitar rattling at his side, tendered an envelope.

“Yes, yes,” said the hotel servant.  “I will see that it is delivered into the gentleman’s own hands.  And, tell me”—­he lowered his voice as he winked his eye—­“has she returned from Alexandria?”

Qatim was caught in a quandary, and he cursed the vanity which had urged him to don his most resplendent garments upon his errand to the great hotel, to which he had come after a violent argument with Zulannah.

With a heart full of hatred, and agony in her twisted limbs the woman had hung about the streets in front of the hotel until she had seen the man for whom she had felt such a sudden and fleeting love, and who was the primary cause of her disfigurement.

Hurt him she must, if only as a balm to her own physical and mental agony; and in what better way than by destroying his faith in the white girl he loved?

Hence the letter, written hastily in the hovel and consigned to the care of the Ethiopian, who, in return for his assistance, had demanded backshisch in the shape of a pink leaf covered with strange black marks.

The woman’s presence in the great city in her deplorable state was the last thing he wanted to be known; so he lied—­clumsily.

“Nay; she is in Alexandria,” he blurted out.

The commissionaire slowly winked an eye.

“Perhaps,” he said; “perhaps not,” and chuckled as the negro turned hastily and strode away in the direction of the bank.