“No, I may be with some other friends.  You see, it’s this way—­I didn’t come abroad with the Evershams in the first place.  I came in the fall with a school friend and her mother to see Italy.  The Evershams were friends of theirs and were stopping at the same hotel, and since my friends were called back very suddenly, the Evershams asked me to go on to Egypt with them.  It was very nice of them, for I’m a dreadful bother,” said Arlee, dimpling.

“But you speak of leaving them?” he said.

“Oh, yes, I may do that as soon as some other friends of mine, the Maynards, reach here.  They are coming here on their way to the Holy Land and I want to take that trip with them.  And then I’ll probably go back to America with them.”

The Turkish captain stared at her, his dark eyes rather inscrutable, though a certain wonder was permitted to be felt in them.

“You American girls—­your ways are absolute like the decrees of Allah!” he laughed softly.  “But tell me—­what will your father and your mother say to this so rapidly changing from the one chaperon to the other?”

“I haven’t any father or mother,” said the girl.  “I have a big, grown-up, married brother, and he knows I wouldn’t change from one party unless it was all right.”  She laughed amusedly at the young man’s comic gesture of bewilderment.  “You think we American girls are terribly independent.”

“I do, indeed,” he avowed, “but,” and he inclined his dark head in graceful gallantry, “it is the independence of the princess of the blood royal.”

A really nice way of putting it, Arlee thought, contrasting the chivalrous homage of this Oriental with the dreadful “American goose!” of the Anglo-Saxon.

“But tell me,” he went on, studying her face with an oddly intent look, “do these friends now, the Evershams, know these others, the—­the——­”

“Maynards,” she supplied.  “Oh, no, they have never met each other.  The Maynards are friends I made at school.  And Brother has never met them either,” she added, enjoying his humorous mystification.

“The decrees of Allah!” he murmured again.  “But I will promise you an invitation for your chaperon and arrange for the name of the lady later—­n’est-ce-pas?”

“Yes, I will know as soon as I return from the Nile.  You are going to a lot of bother, you and your sister,” declared Arlee gratefully.

“I go to ask you to take a little trouble, then, for that sister,” said the Captain slowly.  “She is a widow and alone.  Her life is—­is triste—­melancholy is your English word.  Not much of brightness, of new things, of what you call pleasure, enters into that life, and she enjoys to meet foreign ladies who are not—­what shall I say?—­seekers after curiosities, who think our ladies are strange sights behind the bars.  You know that the Europeans come uninvited to our wedding receptions and make the strange questions!”

Arlee had the grace to blush, remembering her own avid desire to make her way into one of those receptions, where the doors of the Moslem harem are thrown open to the feminine world in widespread hospitality.