“You don’t quite understand.”  Jinny’s tones were silken smooth.  “You see, I left him in rather unusual circumstances.  It was a place where he had no business in the world to be—­”

At McLean’s unguardedly startled gaze her humor overtook her wrath.

“Oh, it was quite all right for me” she replied mischievously to that look.  “Only not for him.  You see, he was masquerading—­”

“Again?” thought McLean, involuntarily.  Lord, what a hand for the lassies that lad was—­and he had thought him such an aloof one!

“Masquerading as a woman—­so he could take me to a reception.”

Jinny began to falter.  Just putting that escapade into words portrayed its less commendable features.

“It was a woman’s reception,” she began again, “at a Turkish house.  A marriage reception—­”

She had certainly secured McLean’s whole-hearted attention.

“A marriage reception—­a Turkish marriage reception?” he said very sharply and amazedly as his caller continued to pause.  “Do you mean to say that Jack Ryder went into a Turkish house dressed as a woman—?”

There was a pronounced angularity of feature about the young Scotchman which now took on a chiseled sternness.

Swiftly Jinny interposed.  “Oh, you mustn’t blame him, Mr. McLean!  You see, I wanted very much to go to a Turkish reception and I didn’t have the courage to go alone or drag some other tourist as inexperienced as myself, and so Jack—­why, there didn’t seem any harm in his dressing up.  Just for fun, you know.  He put on a Turkish mantle and a veil up to his eyes and he was sure he’d never be found out.  I ought not to have let him, I know—­it was my fault—­”

She looked so flushed and innocent and distressed that McLean’s chivalry rose swiftly to her need.

“Indeed you mustn’t blame yourself Miss—­Miss Jeffries.  You don’t know Egypt—­and Jack does.  He knew that if he had been discovered there would have been no help for him—­and no questions asked afterwards.  And it might have been very dangerous for you.  The blame is just his now,” he said decisively, yet not without a certain weak-kneed sympathy with the culprit.

For if the girl had looked like this ... he could see that she would be a difficult little piece to withstand ... though any man with an ounce of sense in his head would have behaved as a responsible protector and not as a reckless school boy.

“What happened?” he said quickly.

“Oh, nothing happened—­nothing that I know of.  We got along very well, I thought, although now I remember that some people did stare....  But I wasn’t worried at the time.  I thought it was just because I was an American and he was apparently a Turkish woman, but there was no reason why an American might not get a Turkish woman to act as a guide, was there?...  And then Jack told me to go home first—­he said it would be simpler that way and that he would slip over to some friend’s or to some safe place and take his disguise off.  He wore a gray suit beneath it, and the only funny thing was some black tennis shoes....  So I left him.  And he hasn’t been back since.”