“I could manage it perfectly,” she said with coldness.

He bent over her, as they walked.  “Are you so unhappy here?”

“Of course I am unhappy,” she gave back with a clear matter-of-factness that strove to ignore the sudden softening of his voice.  “I am very unhappy.  I realize that I should not be here, that I am intruding upon your hospitality——­”

“You are making me most happy.”

“And I am making my friends most anxious and losing my trip on the Nile.”

“The Nile,” he said, “flows on forever.  Who knows how soon you will see it and under what happier circumstances?”

“Our boat was to sail at ten.  I simply must find a way out to-night——­”

“That is impossible.”  He spoke with sudden irritation, which he softened the next instant, with a light laugh.  “You Americans—­how you hurry!...  Tell me—­have you no heart for all this?”

She looked about her at the silent garden, the deepening shadows, the darkening sky.  Above her head, now, high in the air were the faintly rustling palm leaves.  Behind the palms stretched the wall, high and blankly impassable.  She felt strange, unreal....  Her very fright was unreal.

“Tell me,” he was saying, his voice low and caressing, “are there many girls like you—­in your America?”

She tried to speak quite easily, quite simply.  “You have been in England and France, Captain Kerissen, and you have seen many Americans traveling there.”

“I have seen many—­yes.  But not like you.”  She looked swiftly at him, then more swiftly away.  His eyes were glowing with a look of deep excitement; his teeth flashed white under his small, dark mustache.  “Shall I tell you how you appear beside those others?”

“No, thank you,” the girl answered with a hurried crispness which brought a stare and then a low laugh from him.

“You have been told so often?” he suggested.

“I never permit myself to be told at all!” Anger made her young voice imperious, but her heart was beating furiously.  Involuntarily she quickened her steps and he reached his hand to her bare forearm and held her back.

“Pardon—­but you are too quick.”

She stood rigid, some deep instinct warning her not to resist.  The situation had gone to the man’s head, she felt dumbly; his courtesy was only a scant veneer over that Oriental cast of view which, like the Latin, reads every accident of propinquity as opportunity.  His hand fell away and they walked on in slower time.  When he spoke his voice betrayed the feeling quickening within him.

“Then I have a pleasure before me, for you will listen, please.  To me your sister Americans are like big, bright flowers which grow by the wayside where every wind blows hard upon them.  And each receives the dust of the footsteps of many men till comes the one who shall possess her.  But he does not bear her away.  He puts his name upon her, but leaves her out in the same field where every passerby may look and handle——­”