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You know how foolish and cruel he was about Mr. Sheridan on the ship. Well, he hadn't forgotten. So he turned round and almost snatched me out of the house, rather than I should be left in Asiut with him away." "This is exactly what we thought must have happened!" exclaimed Monny. "That beast, Bedr! And to think that Rachel and I wasted our time trying to convert him!
Fired by her enthusiasm, as he had not been by my beguiling, he volunteered to go to Luxor on two or three days' leave, with his wife, to visit a Syrian friend who had often vainly invited them to his villa, and arriving if possible about the time our boat was due. If we succeeded in our quest, we might bring Mabel to them, and they would smuggle her back to the American Consulate at Asiut.
"Yes, with her address on it nothing more in writing: but two other words, pricked with a pin. 'Save me. Don't you see, if her husband had pounced on it, no harm would have been done. He wouldn't have noticed the pin-pricks, as a woman would. I thought she was going to live in Cairo, and I believe she thought so too, at first. But she's written down the name of a house in a place called Asiut.
We came to Asiut in the morning, and it was to be a long stop, for there was much to see, and every one was excited at the thought of our first Nile town, a town already of Upper Egypt, which made it seem that we had come a tremendous way from Cairo.
I obeyed instructions, and in the town of Asiut, far from the gardens along the Nile front, I came to a house between the mosque of the tallest minaret, and the great market whither Arabia as well as Egypt sends her wares. It was a house of some pretension, though in a narrow unpaved street, lined with humble native dwellings.
"You mustn't on any account get mixed up in an adventure of that sort! Remember, this is Egypt " "I don't care," said Monny, "if it's the moon." She believed that this settled the matter. I believed the exact opposite. But I left it at that, for the moment, as the boat was waiting, and Asiut seemed a long way off.
The American Consul wired from Asiut that he was detained by an Important Personage, who wanted to know things about Egyptian Cotton and its enemy the boll worm. But Mr. and Mrs. Bronson would arrive at the Villa Sirius, Luxor, day after to-morrow, "ready for emergencies."
"She told you to tell me about this?" "I warned her that you mightn't approve," I explained. "I said you had more knowledge of Egypt in your little finger than I had in all my gray matter, and you might think that nothing could be done " "Tell her I think something may be done," he interrupted me. "And before we reach Asiut we'll plan out how best to do it." "You and I?"
In fifteen minutes the surprise will be ready, and you will receive the signal to return, from Mr. Bronson, American Consul at Asiut no time for introductions now." Sheridan, amazed, but perhaps not displeased, emerged from the dark corner where, until the row began, he had been examining a half-erased wall-carving.
Rechid might have tired of playing dragon, as Antoun prophesied; yet it would be strange if he had not given instructions that no European ladies were to visit his wife. Mabella Hanem had been snatched in haste from Asiut, but if she were still in Luxor with her husband, she and her women in the harem would be guarded by eunuchs, as in the more ambitious villa which Rechid called his home.
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