“My letters—­letters for Baroff,” she demanded of the clerk.  “None yet.  Then my room, please....  But I sent a wire from Alexandria.  That stupid maid,” she turned to explain to Billy, her air the last stand of outraged patience.  “She is at the train looking for that luggage she lost,” she added to the clerk, and thereupon she proceeded to arrange for the arrival of the fictitious maid whom Billy heard himself agreeing to go back and fetch if she did not turn up soon, and to engage a room for herself—­a much nicer room than Billy himself was occupying—­then handed over Billy’s sovereigns and turned happily away jingling the huge key of her room.

“It is a miracle!” she cried again, exultant triumph in every pretty line of her.  “My heart dances, my blood is singing—­Oh, if I were on the stage now, the music crashing, the lights upon me, the house packed!  I would enchant them!  I would dance myself mad....  Ah, what you say now—­shall we have a little bottle of champagne to drink to our better acquaintance, Mr. Billy?”

“Not this evening,” said the unemotional young man.  “You are going to sit down at this desk and draw me those plans of the palace.”

Petulantly she shrugged at her rescuer.  “How stupid—­to-morrow you may not have that chance for the champagne,” she observed.  “You think of nothing but to go back and get killed, then?  And I must help you?  Very well.  Here, I will draw it for you and I will tell you all I know.”

She sat down at a desk and began working out the diagrams, and at last she handed the paper to Billy, who sat beside her, and pointed out the rooms and scribbled the words on them for his aid.

“It is very simple,” she said.  “That first square is for the court, and the next square is for the garden.  The hall of banquets comes so, between them, and the hall is two stories tall, and across the top of that, from the selamlik to the harem, runs that little secret passage.  And at the end of it, here, is the little panel into the rose room where she is, and beside the panel outside in the passage are the little steps that go up to that tower room, where they put me on the top.  And from that top room I broke out a locked door on the roof—­that is how I got away.  I climbed down at the end of the harem from one roof to another where it is unfinished....  The rose room is here on the garden, but the windows have bars, and those bars are too strong for breaking.  I have tried it!  There is no way out but the secret way by that passage into the men’s wing, or the other way through the door into the long hall and down the little stairs into the anteroom below.  How Seniha hated me when I made laughter and noise and talk going up and down those stairs to my motor car!”

She laughed impishly, pointing out Seniha’s rooms, facing on the street, and contributing several bizarre anecdotes of the palace life.  But Billy was not to be diverted, and went over the plans again and again, before the diminished number of lights and the hoverings of the attendant Arabs recalled the lateness of the hour to his absorption.