“Monsieur the American,” said the black domino, “you have been most kind to an—­an incognita—­of a masque.  I hope that you dig out of your sands all the secrets that you most desire.”

“You sound as if you were saying good-bye,” said Jack Ryder with quick denial in his blood.

The smile in her eyes flickered.

“Perhaps I have kept you too long from the other guests.”

He shook his head.  “They don’t exist.”

“Ah!  I will give you the chance to say such nice things to them.”

“But I never say nice things—­unless I mean them!”

“Never—­monsieur?”

“Never.  I am very careful what I say,” he assured her, even as he had assured another girl, in what different meaning, hours or centuries before.  “You can believe anything that I say.”

“A young man of character!  Perhaps that goes with the Scotch costume.  I have read the Scots are a noble people.”

“They haven’t a thing on the Americans.  You must know me better and discover—­”

But again her eyes had gone, almost guiltily, to that watch.  And when she raised them again they were not smiling but very strangely resolved.

“Monsieur, it is so hot—­if you would get me a glass of sherbet?”

“Certainly.”  Convention brought out the assent; convention turned him about and marched him dutifully toward the crowded table she indicated.

But something deeper than convention, some warning born of that too-often consulted watch and that strange look in her eyes, that uneasy fear and swift resolve, turned him quickly about again.

Other couples had strolled between them.  He hurried through and stepped back among the palms.

The place was empty.  The black domino was gone.

* * * * *

He wasted one minute in assuring himself that she was not hidden in some corner, not mingled with the crowd.  But the niche was deserted as a rifled nest.  Then his eyes spied the door that the green decorations had conspired to hide and he wrenched it open.

He found himself on a little balcony overlooking the hotel garden.  He knew the place in daytime—­palms and shrubs and a graveled walk and painted chairs where he had drunk tea with Jinny and watched a Russian tourist beautifully smoking cigarettes.

Now the place was strange.  Night and a crescent moon had wrought their magic, and the garden was a mystery of velvet dusks and ivory pallors.  The graveled path ran glimmering beneath the magnolias.  Over the wall’s blankness the eucalyptus defined its crooked lines against the blue Egyptian sky.

No living thing was there ... nothing ... or did that shadow stir?  There, just at the path’s end.

Ryder’s lithe strength was swift.  There was one breathless moment of pursuit, then his hand fell with gripping fierceness upon the huddled dark figure that had sped so frantically to the tiny door in the garden’s end....  A moment more and she would have been through.