“I think Mr. Hill is quite as nice as Lady Claire,” flashed Arlee in a childish voice.

“Claire seems to agree with you.”  Falconer spoke lightly, but underneath sounded the note of the disgruntled male ... resentful of the defection of even the girls he left behind him.  He added, with his fatal gift of truculent expression, “But that’s perfectly absurd.”

“Why absurd?” Arlee’s voice held careful calm.  The flash in her eyes was hidden.

Falconer made a gesture of extreme exasperation.  To waste these precious moonlight moments in trifling debate was the very height of maddening futility.

“Oh, the chap’s a feather-headed adventurer.  What’s the use of talking about him?...  But that’s aside the mark.  I want——­”

“You mustn’t call him an adventurer!” The flash was far from hidden now.  Her wide eyes blazed challenge at the disconcerted young man.  “It’s not fair.  It’s not true.”

“Oh, I don’t mean it in any—­any financial sense,” the harassed Falconer gave back.  “But you can’t expect me to take him seriously after his exploits in Cairo?  He’s flighty.  He goes off like a rocket.  He has illusions—­but——­”

“If you are going to slander him because of what he did for me—­” Arlee’s voice was shaking.

“Oh, can’t you see that’s the key to his character!”

“Yes, I do see it.”  She sounded triumphant now.  For a moment her eves met his full of bright defiance; she hung fire, half scared, then blazed into her revelation.

“For I was in that palace.”

“What?  What?” Falconer questioned in sheer vacancy of shock.

“I said—­I was in that palace, Kerissen’s palace.”

“What!” came from him again, but now in twenty different intonations, with absolute incredulity struggling for dominance.

Desperately she rushed on, her voice shaken but passionate.

“I tell you it is so.  He got me there by a trick, a call upon his sister.  And he kept me by another trick, pretending a quarantine.  I was trapped there.  The messages and all the Alexandria story were Kerissen’s frauds.  He wanted to marry me.  I’d have been there to-night if it hadn’t been for Billy Hill—­that adventurer, as you call him!”

It was impossible.  It was unthinkable.  Falconer stood staring down at this girl whose white, upturned face, so amazingly ethereal and childish, met his astounded gaze with unfaltering fixity, and from his stiff lips dropped disjointed words and phrases, ejaculations of denial, of disbelief.

She swept them utterly aside in her complete affirmation.  “It’s all true—­every bit.”

“You—­in that man’s palace!” He was very pale, but into her white face there surged a sudden flood of color, crimsoning it from brow to throat.

“He didn’t—­hurt me,” she stammered.  “He was—­quite mad—­but he didn’t—­hurt me.”

She heard Falconer draw his breath with a queer, whistling sound.  He pushed back his hat and drew his hand over his forehead.