“It’s monstrous!” she said, and then she, too, fell back on silence.

Suddenly she rose to her feet, carried one hand to her heart and swayed uncertainly for a moment, steadying herself with one hand on the table.

The man turned, following her half-hypnotic gaze, in time to see Colonel Von Ritz bending over her hand.  With recognition, Benton started up, then his jaw dropped and, doubting his own sanity, he fell back into his chair and sat gazing with blank eyes.

At Von Ritz’s elbow stood Pagratide.

Slowly Benton came to his feet, his ears ringing.  Then as Karyl turned from the girl and held out his hand to him, the American heard, as one listening through the roaring of a fever, some question about affairs in Galavia.

He heard Karyl answer, and though the words seemed to come from somewhere beyond Port Said, he recognized that the former King tried to speak in a matter-of-fact voice.

“I have no Kingdom.  Louis took it.”

Karyl had held out his left hand.  The right was bound down in a sling.  But these things were all vague to Benton because it seemed that the pilgrim’s tom-toms were beating inside his brain, and beating out of time.  He could see that Karyl’s eyes also were weary and lusterless.

Turning with an excuse for travel-stain to be removed, Karyl halted.

“Benton,” he said.  There he fell silent.  “Benton,” he said again, forcing himself to speak in a voice not far from the breaking point, “Blanco—­Blanco is dead.”

He turned on his heel and went into the hotel.

Blanco dead!  For a moment Benton felt an insane desire to rush after Karyl and demand his life for Blanco’s.  Some delirious accusation that this man cost him every dear thing in life seemed fighting for expression and reprisal, then he realized that the toreador had won his way into Pagratide’s affection as well as his own.  Tears came to his eyes for an instant.  He focused his gaze on a cigarette-shop across the street.

“Lady!”

A grinning Egyptian face, surmounted by a red fez, showed itself over the railing.  The girl started violently and seemed for a moment on the edge of hysteria.  She laughed unnaturally.  Thus encouraged, the Bedouin’s grin broadened until it radiated good-humor across the swarthy visage from cheek-bone to cheek-bone.

“Nice scarabs, lady!  Only five piastres—­only one shilling,” he spieled.  “Scarabs of a dead dynasty. Tres antique.”

CHAPTER XXIV

IN WHICH KINGS AND COMMONERS DISCUSS LOVE

In the gardens of the hotel, the paths lay ankle-deep in scattered confetti.  Already the scores of lights were going out and those that remained shone on the wreckage of an entertainment ended.