Twenty minutes had passed before all was ready and the Master could return to his cabin.  He rapped as agreed, and was admitted, feeling his cheeks burn at even the analogy between this clandestine entrance and some vulgar liaison—­a thing he scrupulously had avoided all his life.

“Come!” he directed.  She followed him.  Silently he ushered her into her appointed place.  No one had seen them.  He followed her into the little stateroom, closed the door, folded his arms and confronted her with a grim face.

“Before leaving you, madam,” said he, “I wish to repeat that only your sex has saved you from summary execution.  You are guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, in the code of this expedition—­guilty of falsehood and deception that might have introduced fatal complications into my most carefully evolved plan.

“Nevertheless, my code as an officer prohibits any punishment other than this merely nominal arrest.  I must offer you temporary hospitality.  Moreover, if you need any assistance in dressing your wound, I will give it.  Common humanity demands that.”

“I don’t need anything, thank you,” she answered.  “I don’t ask for anything, but to stay with the Legion.”

“That’s a point I must positively decline to argue, madam,” he informed her, shaking his head.  “And, since there is nothing more to say, I wish you a very good night!”

Bowing, he left the stateroom.  He heard the door-catch snap.  Somehow, in some way as yet inexplicable to him, that sound caused him another discomfort.  For the first time in his life he had been having private conversation with a woman—­conversation that might almost have been construed as intimate, since it had held secrets.  For the first time he had felt himself outwitted by a woman, beaten, made mock of.  Now he was being shut away from her.

Inwardly raging as he was, hot, confused, unhorsed, still a strange, fingering insinuation of something agreeable had begun to waken in him.  The Master, not understanding it at all, or being able to analyze sensations so foreign to all his previous thought and experience, cut the Gordian knot of puzzlement by roundly cursing himself, by Allah and the Prophet’s beard, as a fool.  And with a vastly disturbed mind he returned along the white, gleaming corridor—­that dipped and swayed with the swift rush of Nissr—­back to his own cabin.

There he found the buzzer of his little desk-telephone intermittently calling him.

“Yes, hello?” he answered, receiver at ear, as he sat down in the swivel-chair of aluminum with its hydrogen cushion.

The voice of the wireless man, Menendez, reached him.  In a soft, Spanish-accented kind of drawl, Menendez said: 

“Just picked up two important radios, sir.”

“Well?  What are they?”

“International Air Board headquarters, in Washington, has been notified of our getaway.  They have sent out calls for all air-stations in both America and Europe to put up scout-squadrons to watch for us.”