“Oh, it’s a long road that has no turning, and my chance will yet come!  Bah!  I snap my fingers at such weak friendship.  Good-night, all of you, but not good-by.”

Thus she disappears.

Craig feels abashed.

He has almost come to blows with his best friend about this female, and, after all, she turns out to be the plotting Pauline.

“I think I need a guardian,” he murmurs, as if rather disgusted with himself.

“From the ugly looks some of these chaps are bending on you, I think ditto,” declares Philander, nor are his words without meaning, for the natives scowl dreadfully.

“Lady Ruth, I owe you thanks; but, while we walk to the hotel, tell me how you came to know she was masquerading in that style.”

“It is easily told, sir.  A mere accident put me in possession of the facts, and, thank Heaven, I am able to build two and two together.  You were frank enough, Doctor Craig, to give me certain particulars concerning that creature’s plotting, and that confidence has now borne fruit.

“Listen, then.  I was in the hotel, in my room.  Some freak of fortune placed her in the apartment opposite.  Knowing what presumably brought her to Algiers, the desire to have revenge upon you, I entertained a feeling of almost contempt for a woman who could so forget her sex and seek a man who loved her not.  If it were I whom you jilted, Doctor Chicago, I would freeze you with scorn.”

“Jove!  I don’t doubt it, Lady Ruth, but please Heaven you will never have the chance,” he says, in a half-serious, half-joking way.

“To return to my story, then,” she continues, blushing under the ardent look that has accompanied his words, “the queer part of it lies in the fact that a transom over my door was partly open.  There was a black paper back of the glass, which gave it the properties of a mirror.

“Over her door was a similar contrivance, and as I sat there in the darkness of my room, pondering over what has happened, my attention was attracted by a flash of light, and, looking up, I saw the interior of her room as plainly as though looking through the door—­saw her assume the garb of a Sister—­saw her try on that horrible face-mask before a mirror, and realized that the clever actress, Pauline Potter, was about to again undertake some quixotic crusade in the furtherance of her plans.

“Later on, Aunt Gwen came and said we had better go outside to hear the music and see the crowd, so I came, but all the while I had been puzzling my brain wondering what she hoped to accomplish with that clever disguise, nor did the truth break in upon my mind until we discovered her talking to Doctor Chicago.  Then I comprehended all.”

“And I am again indebted to your clever woman’s wit,” he says, warmly.

“Who can tell from what dreadful fate I saved you,” she laughs; “for this same Pauline seems determined that you shall not remain a merry bachelor all your days.”