corpulent old Mussulmans riding in state, accompanied by their pipe-bearers, or sitting half-asleep in coffee-houses or at the doors of their shops.  Now and again a bevy of Turkish ladies glided by:  mere peripatetic bundles of white linen, closely-veiled and yellow-slippered; or a Greek in his white petticoat, fierce in aspect and armed to the teeth; or an Armenian merchant, Arnauts, Bashi-Bazouks, French Spahis, the Bedouins of the desert, but half-disguised as civilised troops, while occasionally there appeared, amidst the heterogeneous throng, the plain suit of grey dittoes worn by the travelling Englishman, or the more or less simple female costumes that hailed from London or Paris.

Misseri’s hotel did a roaring trade.  It was crowded from roof-tree to cellar.  Rooms cost a fabulous price.  Mrs. Wilders managed to be very comfortably lodged there notwithstanding.

She still lingered in Constantinople.  Her anxiety for her husband forbade her to leave the East, although she told her friends it was misery for her to be separated from her infant boy.  She might have had a passage home in a dozen different steamers returning empty, all of them in search of fresh freights of men or material; or there was Lord Lydstone’s yacht still lying in the Golden Horn and ready to take her anywhere if only she said the word.  But that, of course, was out of the question, as she had laughingly told her husband’s cousin more than once when he had placed the Arcadia at her disposal.

They met sometimes, but never on board the yacht, for that would have outraged Mrs. Wilders’s nice sense of propriety.  It was generally at Scutari, where poor young Anastasius Wilders lay hovering between life and death, for Mrs. Wilders, with cousinly kindliness, came frequently to the wounded lad’s bedside.

She was bound for the other side of the Bosphorus as she went downstairs one fine morning towards the end of October, dressed, as usual, to perfection.

A man met her as she crossed the threshold, a man dressed like, and with the air of, an Englishman—­a pale-faced, sandy-haired man, with white eyebrows, rather prominent cheek-bones, and a retreating chin.

“Good morning, my dear madam.”  He spoke with just the faintest accent, betraying that English was not his native tongue.  “Like a good Sister, going to the hospital again?”

Mrs. Wilders bowed, and, with heightened colour, sought to pass hastily on.

“What! not one word for so old a friend?” He spoke now in French—­perfect Parisian French.

“I wish you would not address me in public:  you know you promised me that,” replied Mrs. Wilders, in a tone of much vexation, tinged with the respect that is born of fear.

“Forgive me, madam, if I have presumed.  But I thought you would wish to hear the news.”

“News!  Of what?”

“Another battle, a fierce, terrible fight, in which, thank Heaven! the English have suffered defeat!” He spoke with an exultation that proved him to be a traitor, or no Englishman.