“Find out where she went yesterday.  Find out where she is now.  What worries me,” he burst out, with ungovernable uneasiness, yet with a hint of humor at his own extravagant imaginings, “is her talking to that Turk fellow yesterday—­that Captain Kerissen, I think she called him.  She had told me the night before that he was going to get her some ball tickets or other, and I didn’t think anything of it, but yesterday I thought he had his nerve to come and call upon her.  You see, I passed through the hall and saw them talking.  I went out to the veranda and after he had gone I came in again, but she was nowhere in sight.  Then I went back to the veranda, and in a few moments she came out, in white with a rose on her hat, and went off in a car that was ready.  Of course Kerissen wasn’t in the car, and I haven’t any proof of his connection with the thing, but he might easily have induced her to look at some mosque or other off the ’beaten track’——­”

“But she returned, for later she sent that telegram from the station,” Falconer argued.

Billy was silent.  Then he burst out, “But all the same there is a mystery to this thing....  She—­she’s too confoundedly young and pretty to run around alone in this painted jade of a city.”

“This city has law and order—­much more of them than there are in your national hotbeds of robbery and murder.”

“H’m—­well, I don’t hold any brief for Chicago—­I suppose Chicago is the target—­so I won’t defend that.  But I’ve heard stories.”

“Queer ones, I should say.”

“Devilish queer ones!...  How about that young Monkton or Monkhouse who dropped out of things last winter?”

Falconer looked annoyed.  “Oh, there are rumors——­”

“Yes, rumors that he flirted with a Turkish lady—­that he was on horseback just outside her carriage during the jam at the Kasr-el-Nil bridge, and they looked and smiled and afterwards met in a shop.  And rumors that she gave him a rendezvous at her home and that he told another man about it at the club, who warned him sharply, and he only laughed....  But it’s no rumor that he disappeared.  He’s gone, all right, and nobody knows where he went, and nobody seems to want to know.  Officially they said he was drowned out swimming—­or lost in a sandstorm riding in the desert—­or spiked on top of an obelisk or something equally reasonable—­but, privately, people say other things....  No international law intrudes into the Turkish woman question.”

“What of it?” Falconer looked stubborn.  “I daresay the fellow received his deserts....  But the case hardly applies—­what?”