“You guessed?  Don’t they know?  What did they think?  Oh, where did everyone think I was?”

He told her, dwelling upon the misleading details; the hasty message of farewell from the station, the directions about luggage, the money to pay the hotel bill.  “You see, his wits and luck were just playing together,” he said.

“Then the Evershams are up the Nile?”

“Of course.  They never dreamed——­”

“They wouldn’t.”  Arlee was silent.  She wondered confusedly—­she wanted to ask a question—­she wanted to ask two questions.

“But—­but—­no one else——?” she stammered.

There was a particularly large lump of sand in Billy B. Hill’s throat just then; he cleared it heavily.  “Oh, yes, some one else guessed, too,” he said then.  “That English friend of yours, Robert Falconer, he and I had a regular old shooting party in the palace last Sunday evening.  If you’d been there then he would certainly have had you out.”

“So he knows.”  She said it a little faintly, Billy thought, as if she was disappointed and troubled.  She would know, of course, by intuition, how the Englishman would think about a scrape of that sort.

“But he doesn’t know now,” he said eagerly.  “He is sure you are all right in Alexandria, because the Evershams received another fake telegram from you from Alexandria.  The Captain was stalling them along, apparently, keeping everything under cover as long as possible.  And when Falconer heard about that, his suspicions were over.  He thought we’d made fools of ourselves in going to the palace.”

She was silent.  Looking at her, after a while, Billy saw her staring out obliviously into the darkness; her hair was hanging all about her.

His glance seemed to recall her thoughts.  She started and then brushed back her hair; the sand fell from it and she took hold of one soft strand.  “Look out, I’m going to shake this!” she warned, and he half shut his eyes and underneath the lids he saw her shaking her head as vigorously as a little terrier after a bath.

“Isn’t it awful?” she appealed.

“I could scratch a match on my face,” he confirmed.

“But tell me,” she began again, “how did you know I was in that palace?  And I must tell you how I happened to go and how I was kept there.”

“You were told there was a quarantine, weren’t you?” Billy supplied, as she hesitated.

Her astonishment found quick speech.  “Why, how did you know that?”

“The Baroff told me—­that Viennese girl who came into your room.”

“Why, you know everything!  How did you?”

“Oh, I carried her over a wall, thinking it was you.”

“But how could you think it was I?  And what were you doing at the wall?  I don’t see how——­”

“Oh, one of the palace maids gave me a message in Arabic and I thought it was from you.  You see, I suspected—­I had seen you drive off in that motor——­”