But probably he wasn’t in any trouble.  Probably he was just at his diggings—­rushing off from her in the exasperating way he seemed to do whenever they were getting on particularly well....  She remembered how he had bolted from that masquerade which had begun so happily.  He had said he was ill, but she had never completely slain the suspicion that his illness sprang from ennui and disinclination.

She rose.  “I mustn’t take any more of your time, Mr. McLean—­and you probably have a four fifteen engagement.”

But her light raillery failed of its mark.

“Eh?  No, I have not,” seriously he assured her.  “You are quite the last one I took on—­the last before tea.”

He paused confused with a strange suggestion....  Tea....  His servant did it rather well....  And it was time—­

Usually he had it in the garden.  It was a charming garden, full of roses, with a nice view of the Citadel—­and his strange suggestion expanded with a rosy vision of Jinny among the roses, beside his wicker table....  Would she possibly care to—?

He struggled with his idea—­and with his shyness.  And then the sense that it wasn’t quite decent, somehow, to be offering tea to this girl whom anxiety for Ryder’s unknown lot had brought to him overcame that unwonted impulse.

He dismissed the idea.  And like all shy men he was oddly relieved at the passing of the necessity for initiative, even while he felt his mild hope’s expiring pang.

He stepped before her to open the doors to which she was now taking herself.

In the entrance he saw his clerk—­the clever one—­going out, and excusing himself he went forward to detain the man.  For a moment there ensued a low-toned colloquy.  Then the clerk, a dark-browned keen-featured fellow in European clothes with a red fez, began to relate something.

When McLean turned back to Jinny Jeffries she saw that his look was sharply altered.  There was a transfixed air about him and when he spoke his voice told her that he had had a shock.

“My man tells me,” he said, “that Hamdi Bey’s bride is dead.  He buried her yesterday.”

CHAPTER XXII

FROM THE BAZAARS

There was a moment’s pause.

“What?  That lovely girl?” said Jinny in startled pity.  She added incredulously, “Yesterday?...  And only the day before—­why, what could have happened?”

That was what McLean was asking himself very grimly.

Aloud he told her slowly.  “They say that fire happened.  Some accident—­a candle overturned in her apartments.  And of course the windows were screened—­”

“Fire—­how terrible!  That lovely girl,” said Jinny again.  She was genuinely horrified and pitiful, yet she found a moment to wonder at the evident depths of McLean’s consternation.  For of course he had never seen the girl.

Yet he looked utterly upset.