To the irate doorkeeper he protested that he was yearning to paint a palace court, but though he held up gold pieces, the man ordered him away in fury and spoke menacingly of a stick for such fellows.

Now, however cool and fresh it was in the garden that Saturday, it was distinctly hot in the dusty street, and by noon, as Billy sat in the shade beside the palace door, eating the lunch he had brought and drinking out of a thermos bottle, he reflected that for a man to cook himself upon a camp stool, feigning to paint and observing an uneventful door, was the height of Matteawan.  He despised himself—­but he returned to the camp stool.

Nothing continued to happen.

Travelers were few.  Occasionally a carriage passed; once a couple of young Englishmen on polo ponies galloped by; once a poor native came down the road, moving his harem—­a donkey-cart load of black shrouded women, with three half-naked children bouncing on a long tailboard.

Several groups of veiled women on foot proceeded to the cemetery and back again.

The one-eyed man sauntered by in vain.

In the heat of the afternoon the wide door suddenly opened and Captain Kerissen himself appeared on his black horse.  He spurred off at a gallop, intending apparently to ride down the artist on the way, but changed his mind at the last and dashed past, showering him with dust from his horse’s hoofs.  The little donkey-boy, lolling down the road, started to follow him, crying out for alms in the name of Allah.

Billy stared up at the windows.  Not a handkerchief there, not a signal, not a note flung into the street!  In great derision he squirted half a tube of cerulean blue upon his canvas.

This, he reflected, was zero in detective work.  It was also minus in adventure.

But one never knows when events are upon the wing.  Almost immediately there came into the flatness of his bored existence a victoria containing those two English ladies he had met—­in the unconventional way which characterized his meetings with ladies in Cairo—­two days before.

The recognition was mutual.  The curiosity appeared upon their side.  To his horror he saw that they had stopped their carriage and were descending.

“How interesting!” said Miss Falconer, with more cordiality than she had shown on the previous occasion.  “How very interesting!  So you are an artist—­I do a little sketching myself, you know.”

“You do happen in the most unexpected places,” smiled Lady Claire.

The English girl looked very cool and sweet and fresh to the heated painter.  His impression of her as a nice girl and a pretty girl was speedily reinforced, and he remembered that dark-haired girls with gray-blue eyes under dusky lashes had been his favorite type not so long ago ... before he had seen Arlee’s fairy gold.

“We’ve just been driving through the old cemetery—­such interesting tombs,” said the elder lady, and Lady Claire added, “I should think you could get better views there than here.”