“I understood.  That plaid about the box—­that was so clever a warning.  I kept the box and hunted in it.”

“I wanted to tell you more about that locket.  I dug it up myself from the tomb I was excavating—­do you remember how you wished that I would dig from the sands whatever secret I most desired?  And I found that....  And it happened that at McLean’s I had met the French agent who was searching for any trace of the Delcasses, of the wife and child of the explorer who had disappeared fifteen years before.  That miniature was your image, and I guessed at once.  McLean and I went to the pasha—­Oh, I didn’t tell him I’d met you!” he flung in, his eyes twinkling, “and we pretended we knew all about his marriage to Madame Delcasse and he owned up without a quiver.  But when we tried to claim you for the French family, he doubled like a hare.  He said the Delcasse child was dead, died when his own child was a baby, and that you were his own.  But I was sure that you were more than fourteen, and that he was simply putting it over on us so as to have this marriage go on without interference—­and so I tried to get the story to you.  Even now I thought you ought to know,” he added, as if in palliation of his invasion here.

For he realized now how tremendous an invasion it was.

All the guests about him had not given him that feeling, all that sea of femininity, those grave matrons whose serenely unveiled faces would burn with shame to be beheld by this stranger, those bright, slim girls in their extravagant frocks, their tulle, their lace, their pearls, their diamonds, all the hidden charms that no man had yet seen stirred in him no more than an excited and adventurous curiosity.

But the vision of Aimee—­that delicate beauty in its tragic irony of throne and diadem!  It touched him to tenderness and to an actual sense of sacrilege at the freedom of his gaze.  No moonlight vision this, ethereal and dream-like, but a vivid, disquieting radiance of dark, shining eyes and rose-flushed cheeks.  He had never seen her hair before, midnight hair, escaping little curls from the veil and the diadem.  And he had never really seen her mouth—­wistful and gay, like the mouth of the miniature ... nor her chin, so tender and willful ... nor her skin, satin-soft, in its veiling from the daylight....

She was more than young and sweet and fair.  She was beauty, beauty with its elusive, ineluctable spell, entangled with the appeal of her helplessness.

A bright blush flooded her now and her eyes fell in confusion, before the prolonging of his look.

“But it is dangerous—­your being here,” she murmured.

“The fortieth door,” he reminded her.

Under her breath, “Ah, you remember?”

“I remember.  And but last night I heard Khazib, the story teller, tell the tale, and I thought of you and your warning—­of the door that hid you, that it was forbidden for me to open.”