“It’s just a few lines for Miss Falconer,” Lady Claire unnecessarily explained.  “We are going to drive out to the Gezireh Palace Hotel for tea, and she thought her brother might like to go out with us if he came in in time.”

She did not add why Miss Falconer was unable to write her own notes, but slanted her blue-hatted head over the desk and then hastily blotted her brief lines and tucked the sheet into an envelope.  Hesitantly she looked up at Billy.

“Have you been out to the Gezireh Palace?” she very innocently inquired.

“Alone,” said Billy.

“It’s very jolly there,” said she.  “It’s so gay—­and the music is quite good.”

“H’m,” meditated Billy.  “The condemned man ate a hearty tea of Orange Pekoe and cress sandwiches,” he reflected silently.  He also reflected that Miss Falconer would be furious—­and that invited him—­and that time was interminable and that this expedition was as good a way of getting through the afternoon as any other.  Thereupon he turned to the English girl, with a humorous challenge in his gaze.  “I wonder if you and Miss Falconer would let this be my tea party?” he suggested.

“Miss Falconer will be delighted,” said Lady Claire mendaciously.

The traces of that delight, however, lay beneath so well schooled an exterior that they were decidedly non-apparent.  Nor did Robert Falconer’s mien reveal any hint of joy when he returned to the hotel and found the two ladies starting with Billy.  He joined them with rather the air of a watch dog, but that air soon wore away during the long drive under the spell of young Hill’s frank friendliness and gay good humor.  For Billy was extravagantly in spirits.  Excitement stirred in him like wine; his blood was on fire with thoughts of the evening.

“It’s the fool lark of the thing,” he said, half apologetically, to Falconer’s wonder when the two young men were alone for a minute on the Gezireh verandas.  “Didn’t you ever want to be a pirate?”

The red-headed young man nodded.  “Yes, but this business doesn’t make me feel like a pirate—­more like a second-story man!”

“I’ve left letters with Fritzi Baroff,” said Hill, “and if we’re not back by morning, she’s to go to the authorities with them.”

“That won’t do us any good,” said the Englishman grimly.

But after the ladies returned it was a very merry-seeming tea party.  Even Miss Falconer unbent to the artist, as she persisted in calling Billy, though he had dutifully enlightened her that engineering was his true and proper life work, and art but a random diversion, and she promised to show him the sketches which she had been making, and piled him with questions about his mysterious America.

And Lady Claire was very prettily animated, and rallied Falconer upon his absent-mindedness and told Billy tales of her English home and how her father had threatened to change the name of the Hall to Maedchenheim because there were five daughters of them. “Five girls near an age, Mr. Hill, and all poor as church mice!” she had blithely asserted.