United States or Grenada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Desperately she rushed on, her voice shaken but passionate. "I tell you it is so. He got me there by a trick, a call upon his sister. And he kept me by another trick, pretending a quarantine. I was trapped there. The messages and all the Alexandria story were Kerissen's frauds. He wanted to marry me. I'd have been there to-night if it hadn't been for Billy Hill that adventurer, as you call him!"
And Billy determined to do a little loitering himself and quicken the one-eyed man's investigations and keep watch of Kerissen's comings and goings, and a donkey boy was hired by the one-eyed man to follow the Captain when he appeared in the street and report the places to which he went.
Billy flung shut the door, drew a long breath, and turned to him. "Do you know where I got that girl?" he demanded. It took several seconds of Falconer's level-lidded look of distaste to bring home the realization. "Oh, see here," he protested, "wait till you understand this thing.... I pulled that girl over Kerissen's back wall at ten o'clock to-night.
The candle lights glinted on the muzzle of a gun leveled steadily at him. "Stay where you are," the Captain added, and Billy stayed, and through the dusk the two men stood eyeing each with a glare of hatred. But Kerissen's eyes held hatred triumphant. "So, Monsieur," said the Turk. "This is the midnight call you gentlemen pay in the chamber of my wife." "Your wife!" Billy gave a snort of unbelief.
With an angry little pang she recognized it, pinning on the lace hat with its enchanting rose, and then desperately she resolved to employ it and added two of Kerissen's pink roses to the costume. She thought the scene was very like a stage, when she came out through the narrow door which the old woman unlocked from a key she carried on a girdle, and slowly descended the stone steps.
Those roses came, the letter explained, to droop their heads before her loveliness, which put theirs to shame. They would greet her as humbler sisters greet a fairer. For they were roses of a day, but she was the Rose of Life. The capitals were Kerissen's own. And then abruptly the letter demanded: Did I frighten you last night?
So this, he thought rapidly, was the foreign girl in Kerissen's house, and Arlee, bless her little golden head, was safe where she planned, in Alexandria. A warm glow of happiness enveloped him at that. "Now tell me all about it," he demanded again. "You are running away from Kerissen?" "Oh, yes," she cried eagerly. "You must not let him catch us. We are safe yes?"
He had a favor to ask. The American girl of Kerissen's palace had escaped unharmed and returned to her friends who were ignorant of all. She was this moment in the ruins. It would be a great shock to her to meet Fritzi, to have Fritzi recognize her. On the morning she would be gone. Would Fritzi "
"You see, they'll expect us to make a railroad station as soon as possible," he explained, "and they are probably trying to nab us on the way to it if those men have anything to do with us at all." He said nothing about his vivid fear of arrest for the camels and the tool such an arrest would be for Kerissen's designs.
For a moment her eves met his full of bright defiance; she hung fire, half scared, then blazed into her revelation. "For I was in that palace." "What? What?" Falconer questioned in sheer vacancy of shock. "I said I was in that palace, Kerissen's palace." "What!" came from him again, but now in twenty different intonations, with absolute incredulity struggling for dominance.
Word Of The Day