“And you went?  And she came?”

“Do you suppose she sent her father?”

“You’re lucky she didn’t send her father’s eunuch,” McLean retorted grimly.  “Well, get on with your damning story.  The girl took off her veil—­”

“Nothing of the kind,” said Jack a trifle testily—­so soon does conventional masculinity champion the conservatism of the other sex!  “That was just as I was going—­gone, in fact.  I looked back and she had drawn her veil aside.  The moon was bright on her face—­I saw her as clear as daylight, and I tell you that this miniature is a picture of her.  She is Delcasse’s daughter and she doesn’t know it.  Her mother was stolen by that disgusting old Turk—­”

“Hold on a bit.  Fifteen years ago Tewfick could hardly have been thirty and he has the rep of a Don Juan.  It may have been a love affair or it may have been plunder....  The girl remembers her?”

“Very little.  She was so young when her mother died.  She said that the father was so in love that he never married again.”

“H’m ...  It seems to me that I’ve heard tales of our Tewfick and of pretty ladies in apartments.  Cairo is a city of secrets and tattlers.  However—­as to this Delcasse inheritance, I’ll just notify the French legation—­”

“We’ll have to look sharp,” said Ryder quickly.  “There’s no time to lose.  The girl is to be married.”

“Married?...  But she’ll inherit the money just the same.”

“But she doesn’t want to be married,” Ryder insisted anxiously.  “Her father—­her alleged father—­has just sprung this on her.  Says there are political or financial reasons.  He’s been caught in some dirty work by this Hamdi Bey and he’s stopping Hamdi’s mouth with the girl....  And we’ve got to stop that.”

“I wonder if we can,” said McLean thoughtfully.

“If we can?  When the girl is French?  When she’s been lied to and deceived?”

“She seems to have been taken jolly well care of.  Brought up as his own and all that.  Keep your shirt on, Jack,” McLean advised dryly with a shrewd glance from his gray eyes at the other’s unguarded heat.

Then his eyes dropped to the miniature again.  A lovely face.  A lovely unfortunate creature....  And if the daughter looked like that, small wonder that Jack was touched....  Beauty in distress.

Some men had all the luck, McLean reflected.  He had never taken Jack for the gallivanting kind, either, yet here he was going to masquerades with one girl and coming home with another....

Jack was too good looking, that was the trouble with the youngster.  Good looking and gay humored.  The kind that attracted women....  Women and romance were never fluttering about lank, light-eyed, uninteresting old Scotchmen of twenty-nine!

A mild and wistful pang, which McLean refused to name, made itself known.

“I’ll see the legation,” he began.

“At once.  I’ll wait,” urged Ryder.