hose twenty-four hours, at a correspondence stage, but still she
had made a positive engagement for that evening--and she had known
he was trying to buy that berth. Only that morning she had listened
to his account of his endeavors with a mischievous light in her blue
eyes and a prankish smile edging her pink lips ... and she might,
after that, have left just a line to tell him to cancel his
arrangements.... But what could he expect from such a tricksy sprite
of a girl? Only twenty-seven hours before he had seen her,
flagrantly tardy, nonchalantly unrepentant, first mock and then
annihilate the worthy and earnest young Englishman who had
endeavored to correct her ways ... He had known then the volatile
stuff that she was made of--and had succumbed to it!

But he _had_ succumbed. On that point he was most disastrously
certain. The memory of the young girl possessed him. Her beauty
haunted him, that spring-like beauty with its enchanting youth and
gaiety. And the spirit that animated that beauty, that young,
blithe, innocently audacious spirit which looked out on the world
with such sunnily trustful eyes, drew him with a golden cord.

       *       *       *       *       *

He smoked many a pipe over it that night, his feet on the open
window ledge, his eyes on the far-spreading flat roofs, the distant
domes and minarets darkly silhouetted against the sky of softest,
deepest blue. The stars were silver bright. They spangled the heaven
with the radiance they never give to northern skies; they gleamed
like bright, wild creatures on their unearthly revels.... It would
be glorious camping in the desert on a night like this ... Heaven be
praised, he had not bought that berth ... Alexandria ... the
Maynards ... the desert ...

He knocked out the ashes from his last pipe and rose briskly. His
decision was made, but its success was on the knees of the great god
Luck.




CHAPTER VII

BILLY HAS HIS DOUBTS


The encounter in the bazaars that Thursday afternoon brought one
more result to young Hill besides the bruise upon h