United States or Cabo Verde ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
You can just have been camping in the desert and true enough that is! with those friends of yours whom the Evershams don't know. Only your reappearance has to be managed a bit." Very carefully she tore the tangerine skin into very little bits, her head bent over it. Then she flung the fragments far from her with a gesture of rebellion. "I hate fibs," she said explosively.
And dimly she felt that she didn't want him to think she had utterly forgotten her promise of the evening before last, and she didn't want him to be filled with whatever dismal impression the Evershams were giving out.
He went out to the lounge and smoked with violence. Presently he saw the Evershams in the doorway talking to Robert Falconer, and he jumped up and hurried to join them. As he approached he heard the word Alexandria spoken fretfully by Mrs. Eversham.
You are the only soul I know to be interested in Miss Beecher's welfare. The Evershams are off up the Nile and they'd probably be helpless, anyway. Besides, you know more about this blamed Egypt of yours than I do.... Have you any idea where she went yesterday afternoon?" "Not at all." "Neither have the Evershams. They were surprised when I asked them about it this morning.
On what wings of folly she had come alone to this place! Her bright adventure was a stupid scrape. Oh, what mischance what mischance! She was chokingly ashamed of the predicament to be penned up by a quarantine in a Moslem household. She was angry, defiant and humiliated at once. What would the Evershams say and Robert Falconer
Friday morning he had been practically a prisoner until his trunks had arrived. He had emerged upon a spectacle of England triumphant Robert Falconer escorting Arlee to the temple of Luxor. Later that afternoon he had called upon Arlee upon the boat to find Falconer still there, and the Evershams very much so. Robert Falconer had accompanied him back to the hotel.
"Then you will bury even the memory of this time and never whisper a word of it," he told her stoutly. "The talk and explanation will be over five minutes after your return. The thing is, to manage that return. Now the Evershams left Friday and this is Wednesday six days." "Only six days," she echoed with a ghost of a sigh. "Now let me see where were we on the sixth day? When I was on the Nile?"
But now that the Evershams have heard," and the young Englishman's deep note of relief showed how tormenting had been his uncertainty, "why now we have no further right to put Miss Beecher's name into the affair.
"That goes double.... But you couldn't deny the facts and you did come. Because we failed doesn't change the facts at all. She's there only where? Had we better go straight to the consul now?" "I think," said Falconer coldly, "that we had better telegraph the Evershams to see if they have had any word from her before we stir up any hue and cry."
But at least the Evershams knew where she was. Even the meager warmth of their telegram was like an outstretched hand through the dark. She clung tight to it. It was absurd to be frightened. He would never dare to annoy her never, in his sober senses. When they were alone together he had lost his head, but that was accident impulse... She rolled the divan against the locked door.
Word Of The Day