With an effort she got out, “It is granted—­but never again—­must you misunderstand.  An American girl——­”

She stopped.  There was a lump in her throat.  Across a bright, familiar veranda she could hear a clear, sharp voice answer, “American goose!” She saw a lean tanned face burn red with anger.  A wave of loneliness went through her.  The irony of it was pitiless.  How right Robert Falconer had been!

He was staring down at the table beside him, frowning, considering.  She saw with peculiar distinctness how the cigarette he had dropped had burned a hole in the fine linen.  One of the candles was dripping lopsidedly.  She thought some one ought to right it.  She wondered if that soft step, hesitating, behind the curtains, was the serving woman’s, and she turned toward that doorway.

“I don’t think I care for any coffee,” she said, with an air of careless finality.  “I think I will go back to my room.  Good evening.”

He followed her to the doorway, drawing aside the curtains as she passed into the anteroom, and opening the door at the foot of the steps, with an answering, “Good evening,” and an added, “Till to-morrow, Mademoiselle.”  And then, as the door closed below her, she paused on the dark stairs and huddled against the wall, listening to the faint footfalls from below, crossing and recrossing.  Then, when the silence seemed continual, she tiptoed down the stairs again, softly pushed open the unlatched door, stole across the anteroom to the curtained doorway and peered in.

The salon was empty, and in its center the supper table stood stripped of its cloth and candles.  Only the pale light from the windows dispelled the growing dark.  Like a little white wraith Arlee fled through the room and turned the handle of the door at the head of the haremlik stairs.  The door was locked.

She shook the handle, first cautiously, then with increasing violence, then she ran back into the room to the nearest window, staring down through the screen.  It would have been a steep jump down into the street, but her tense nerves would have dared it instantly.  Her hands tore at the mashrubiyeh, but the tiny spindles and delicate curves held sound and firm.  She beat against it with fierce little fists; she leaped against it with all her trifling weight.  It did not yield an inch.  Was there iron in all that delicacy?  Or was that old wood impregnable in its grim trust?

Wildly she glanced back into the room.  Suppose she took a chair and beat at this carving—­could she clear a way before the servants came?  Could she take the jump successfully?  She gazed down into the street, estimating the fall, trying to calculate the hurt.

As she gazed, her eyes grew fixed and filled with utter amazement.  Down the street, on a black horse that arched his curving neck and danced on light, fleet feet, rode a man in a uniform of green and gold.  He sat erect, his clear-cut profile toward her.  The next instant his horse, side-stepping at a blowing paper, turned his face into view.  It was Captain Kerissen.