He strolled down the terrace, and Lady Chetwynd Lyle, turning her back on “old” Lady Fulkeward, went after her “girls,” while the fascinating Fulkeward herself continued to recline comfortably in her chair, and presently smiled a welcome on a youngish-looking man with a fair moustache who came forward and sat down beside her, talking to her in low, tender and confidential tones.  He was the very impecunious colonel of one of the regiments then stationed in Cairo, and as he never wasted time on sentiment, he had been lately thinking that a marriage with a widowed peeress who had twenty thousand pounds a year in her own right might not be a “half bad” arrangement for him.  So he determined to do the agreeable, and as he was a perfect adept in the art of making love without feeling it, he got on very well, and his prospects brightened steadily hour by hour.

Meanwhile young Fulkeward was escorting Armand Gervase through several narrow by-streets, talking to him as well as he knew how and trying in his feeble way to “draw him out,” in which task he met with but indifferent success.

“It must be awfully jolly and—­er—­all that sort of thing to be so famous,” he observed, glancing up at the strong, dark, brooding face above him.  “They had a picture of yours over in London once; I went to see it with my mother.  It was called ‘Le Poignard,’ do you remember it?”

Gervase shrugged his shoulders carelessly.

“Yes, I remember.  A poor thing at its best.  It was a woman with a dagger in her hand.”

“Yes, awfully fine, don’cher know!  She was a very dark woman—­too dark for my taste,—­and she’d got a poignard clasped in in her right hand.  Of course, she was going to murder somebody with it; that was plain enough.  You meant it so, didn’t you?”

“I suppose I did.”

“She was in a sort of Eastern get-up,” pursued Fulkeward, “one of your former studies in Egypt, perhaps.”

Gervase started, and passed his hand across his forehead with a bewildered air.

“No, no!  Not a former study, by any means.  How could it be?  This is my first visit to Egypt.  I have never been here before.”

“Haven’t you?  Really!  Well, you’ll find it awfully interesting and all that sort of thing.  I don’t see half as much of it as I should like.  I’m a weak chap—­got something wrong with my lungs,—­awful bother, but can’t be helped.  My mother won’t let me do too much.  Here we are; this is the Princess Ziska’s.”

They were standing in a narrow street ending in a cul-de-sac, with tall houses on each side which cast long, black, melancholy shadows on the rough pavement below.  A vague sense of gloom and oppression stole over Gervase as he surveyed the outside of the particular dwelling Fulkeward pointed out to him—­a square, palatial building, which had no doubt once been magnificent in its exterior adornment, but which now, owing to long neglect, had fallen into somewhat melancholy decay.  The sombre portal, fantastically ornamented with designs copied from some of the Egyptian monuments, rather resembled the gateway of a tomb than an entrance to the private residence of a beautiful living woman, and Fulkeward, noting his companion’s silence, added: