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The Captain had brought forward little gilt chairs of a French design which seemed oddly out of place in this room of the East, and the three seated themselves. Out of place, too, seemed the grand piano which Arlee's eyes, roving now past her hostess, discovered for the first time.
"Oh an idea, that's all. Something I must really attend to before I this afternoon, I mean. But there's no hurry about it," he added cheerily. Oh, Billy, Billy! Not even with his blood hot with thoughts of the evening's work, not even with his memory ridden with Arlee's gay witchery, could he keep his restless young eyes from laughing down at her.
His impression of her as a nice girl and a pretty girl was speedily reinforced, and he remembered that dark-haired girls with gray-blue eyes under dusky lashes had been his favorite type not so long ago ... before he had seen Arlee's fairy gold.
For a moment temptation urged. Then he threw back his head with a gesture of decision. "But I can't. It's impossible." Now Lady Claire did not know that he was thinking of next Friday and Arlee's return and the masked ball. She only knew that he spoke with a curious fierceness, and that his eyes were very bright.
Absently she sighed. Her eyes fell away from the peach-blossom prettiness of Arlee's lovely face to the subtle simplicity of her white frock of loosely woven silk, and she wondered if that heavy embroidery meant money or merely spending money. And then she looked across at Lady Claire, and sighed again for her dream of an aristocratic alliance. "Mrs. Eversham ?" she thought to inquire.
But the girl laughed and shook her head at the question, and at the French and German with which Arlee next addressed her, and answered in soft Turkish, at which it was Arlee's turn to laugh and shake her head. But she felt a little rueful behind her pleasant smiling. She wished she could talk with the girl. She wondered about her.
If he had been trying to invent something in order to make capital out of him he would hardly have invented that story of Arlee's departure, for that put an immediate end to further remunerative investigations in the palace. Of course Billy might be mistaken, and the boy might be mistaken, but one had to leave something to probabilities.
I'm really a working person, you know, not a playing one." "You make bridges and dams and things, don't you?" she questioned vaguely. "Bridges and dams and things." "Why don't you wait here for your sailings?" she asked impersonally after another pause. "It's so much more attractive here than Cairo." "I'd like to." He thought of next Friday and Arlee's return and the masked ball.
"You needn't." "I know I needn't." Arlee's tone was suddenly proud. Then she melted again. "But I want you to know. He was he was trying to make me care for him.... He wasn't really as dreadful as you might think him, only just insane about me and utterly unscrupulous. But he did want me to like him and so, when I found out, when Fritzi told me I was in a trap, I tried to play his game.
Perhaps it was the bathed face and the sleep-brightened eyes and the rearranged gown. But certainly Burroughs stared in amazement at the slim little figure that issued from the entrance, and a queer, a very queer confusion seized upon him. Not even outrageous sunburn and pathetic blisters could hide Arlee's young loveliness.
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