For a moment their eyes held each other, smiling but grave.  Ryder’s thoughts were of the morrow, of that forbidden entry he was planning to make, of the risks, the wild uncertainties....

Wisdom and counsel looked significantly out at him out of those patriarchal eyes.  Prudence and sanity clamored within him for a hearing.

And then he smiled, the whimsical, boyish smile of young adventuring.

“But whoever, O, my father, had opened that forbidden door the veriest crack, and breathed its scent and glimpsed its dazzlement—­then for him there is no turning back,” he confided.

He rose and Khazib’s eyes followed him.

“Luck go with you, my son,” he said clearly, “in Allah’s name,” and smiling in faint ruefulness, “May Allah heed thee!” Ryder murmured piously.

CHAPTER XII

THE UNINVITED GUEST

Now as he stood before Aimee, and saw her eyes widen with recognition, he knew that he would have need of all his luck and all his wit.  He stepped hastily forward.

“Alhamdolillah—­Glory to God that he has permitted me to behold you this day,” he murmured, in the studiously sing-song Arabic that might be expected from a humble Turkish woman in plain mantle and yashmak.  “May Allah continue to spread before thee the carpet of enjoyment—­” and then lower, almost muffled by the thick veil, “Can you give me a moment—?”

Eagerly, significantly, his eyes met hers.

Half fearfully, Aimee flashed an excited look around her.  The space before the marriage throne had thinned, for there were no more arrivals waiting to offer their congratulations and the guests were clustering now about the tables for refreshment or drifting into the next salon where behind firmly stretched silken walls a stringed orchestra was playing.

Miss Jeffries alone was lingering near, but she moved off now—­at a secret look from Ryder—­with an appearance of unconcern.

“I am going to try my vernacular on the bride,” Ryder had told her.  “Don’t linger or look alarmed.  I won’t give the show away.”

So there was no one to overhear a low-toned colloquy between the bride and the veiled woman, no one to note or wonder that the veiled woman was speaking, strangely enough, in rapid English.

“When I didn’t hear from you I had to come, to know if you received the package and letter I sent—­”

With a swift gesture of her little ringed hand Aimee drew from the laces on her bosom that heavy gold locket.

“Indeed I have it—­and the note, too, I found.  But I could not write you.  There was no way—­no one to trust to mail it.  And they had stolen my key,” she whispered, and the confessing words with their quiver of forlornness told Ryder something of the story of those helpless days and nights.

He murmured, “I didn’t dare write you more personally for fear they would find the note.”