She turned and led the way forward and for the length of the deck he walked at her side in silence.

As they halted he demanded, very low; “And you—?”

Her answering smile was pallid as she quoted, “’More than a little lonely’—­” then, reverting to her old name for him, she laughed with counterfeited gayety—­“as, Sir Gray Eyes, people must be—­who try to be good.”

CHAPTER XXVI

IN A CURIO SHOP IN STAMBOUL.

The muezzin had called the devout to their prayer-rugs for the third time that day, when the girl and the two men turned from the Stamboul end of Galata Bridge into the tawdry confusion of buildings which cluster about the Mosque Yeni-Djami.  They were bound for the bazaars.

Along the twisting ways stretched the booths of native merchants stocked with the thousand fascinating trifles that the City of the Sultan markets to the journeying world.  Everywhere the crowd surged and jostled.

On the side street where the shops are a trifle larger than their neighbors, one Mohammed Abbas keeps his curio bazaar.  In such flowery Orientalism of appeal did he couch his plea for an inspection of his wares, that Cara was persuaded and turned into the shop.  Cut off by pressure of the crowd, Pagratide, who was following, some paces back, caught a glimpse of her figure in the door and fought his way to her side, but Benton, having stopped to price a bracelet of antique silver set with turquoises, lost sight of them.  The girl had become interested in a quaint, curved dagger thickly studded with semi-precious stones.

Mohammed Abbas urged her to see the rarer and choicer articles which he kept in an upper room.  As they tailed, a half-dozen natives, swarthy and villainous of face, drifted into the shop to be promptly ordered out by the proprietor, who used for that purpose a vocabulary of scope and vividness.  The ruffians retreated after a brief conversation in guttural Arabic, but not by the street door through which they had come.  Instead, they left by a low-arched exit to the rear, concealed from view by the angle of the screening stairway.  Abbas led his customers to an upper room which they found dark except where he lighted it as he went with hanging lamps.  Its space was generous, broken here and there by piles of ebony furniture, inlaid with pearl; pieces of Saracenic armor, Damascened bucklers, and all the gear too large for the narrow confines below.

Half an hour’s searching through the chaos of wares failed to reveal the choice daggers which Mohammed wished them to see, and with many apologies for added annoyance he begged Monsieur and Madame to mount yet another flight, and visit yet another store-room.  At the head of these stairs they encountered absolute darkness and the shopman, with his ever-ready apologies, paused again to light lamps.

As Pagratide’s pupils accustomed themselves to the murk he realized that this last room was bare except for tapestries hung flat against the wall, and that at its farther side narrow slits of light showed along the sills of two doors.  Turning, he noted the darker shadow of some recess in the wall, immediately to his left.