A one-eyed man with a stuffed crocodile upon his head paused before the steps of Cairo\'s gayest hotel and his expectant gaze ranged hopefully over the thronged verandas. It was afternoon tea time; the band was playing and the crowd was at its thickest and brightest. The little tables were surrounded by travelers of all nations, some in tourist tweeds and hats with the inevitable green veils; others, those of more leisurely sojourns, in white serges and diaphanous frocks and flighty hats fresh from the Rue de la Paix.

It was the tweed-clad groups that the crocodile vender scanned for a purchaser of his wares and harshly and unintelligibly exhorted to buy, but no answering gaze betokened the least desire to bring back a crocodile to the loved ones at home. Only Billy B. Hill grinned delightedly at him, as Billy grinned at every merry sight of the spectacular East, and Billy shook his head with cheerful convincingosity, so the crocodile merchant moved reluctantly on before the importunities of the Oriental rug peddler at his heels.

Then he stopped. His turbaned head, topped by the grotesque, glassy-eyed, glistening-toothed monster, revolved slowly as the Arab\'s single eye steadily followed a couple who passed by him up the hotel steps. Billy, struck by the man\'s intense interest, craned forward and saw that one of the couple, now exchanging farewells at the top of the steps, was a girl, a pretty girl, and an American, and the other was an officer in a uniform of considerable green and gold, and obviously a foreigner.

He might be any kind of a foreigner, according to Billy\'s lax distinctions, that was olive of complexion and very black of hair and eyes. Slender and of medium height, he carried himself with an assurance that bordered upon effrontery, and as he bowed himself down the steps he flashed upon his former companion a smile of triumph that included and seemed to challenge the verandaful of observers.

The girl turned and glanced casually about at the crowded groups that were like little samples of all the nations of the earth, and with no more than a faint awareness of the battery of eyes upon her she passed toward the tables by the railing. She was a slim little fairy of a girl, as fresh as a peach blossom, with a cloud of pale gold hair fluttering round her pretty face, which lent her a most alluring and deceptive appearance of ethereal mildness. She had a soft, satiny, rose-leaf skin which was merely flushed by the heat of the Egyptian day, and her eyes were big and very, very blue. There were touches of that blue here and there upon her creamy linen suit, and a knot of blue upon her parasol and a twist of blue about her Panama hat, so that she could not be held unconscious of the flagrantly bewitching effect. Altogether she was as upsettingly pretty a young person as could be seen in a year\'s journey, and the glances of the beholders brightened vividly at her approach.

There was one conspicuous exception. This exception was sitting alone at the large table which backed Billy\'s tiny table into a corner by the railing, and as the girl arrived at that large table the exception arose and greeted her with an air of glacial chill.

"Oh! Am I so terribly late?" said the girl with great pleasantness, and arched brows of surprise at the two other places at the table before which used tea things were standing.

"My sister and Lady Claire had an appointment, so they were obliged to have their tea and leave," stated the young man, with an air of politely endeavoring to conceal his feelings, and failing conspicuously in the endeavor. "They were most sorry."

"Oh, so am I!" declared the girl, in clear and contrite tones which carried perfectly to Billy B. Hill\'s enchanted ears. "I never dreamed they would have to hurry away."

"They did not hurry, as you call it," and the young man glanced at his watch, "for nearly an hour. It was a disappointment to them."

"Pin-pate!" thought Billy, with intense disgust. "Is he kicking at a two-some?"

"And have you had your tea, too?" inquired the girl, with an air of tantalizing unconcern.

"I waited, naturally, for my guest."

"Oh, not naturally!" she laughed. "It must be very unnatural for you to wait for anything. And you must be starving. So am I—do you think there are enough cakes left for the two of us?"

Without directly replying, the young man gave the order to the red-fezzed Arab in a red-girdled white robe who was removing the soiled tea things, and he assisted the girl into a chair and sat down facing her. Their profiles were given to the shameless Billy, and he continued his rapt observations.

He had immediately recognized the girl as a vision he had seen fluttering around the hotel with an incongruously dismal couple of unyouthful ladies, and he had mentally affixed a magnate\'s-only-daughter-globe-trotting-with-elderly-friends label to her.

The young man he could not place so definitely. There were a good many tall, aristocratic young Englishmen about, with slight stoops and incipient moustaches. This particular Englishman had hair that was pronouncedly sandy, and Billy suddenly recollected that in lunching at the Savoy the other day he had noticed that young Englishman in company with a sandy-haired lady, not so young, and a decidedly pretty dark-haired girl—it was the girl, of course, who had fixed the group in Billy\'s crowded impressions. He decided that these ladies were the sister and Lady Claire—and Lady Claire, he judiciously concluded, certainly had nothing on young America.

Young America was speaking. "Don\'t look so thunderous!" she complained to her irate host. "How do you know I didn\'t plan to be late so as to have you all to myself?"

This was too derisive for endurance. A dull red burned through the tan on the young Englishman\'s cheeks and crept up to meet the corresponding warmth of his hair. A leash within him snapped.

"It is simply inconceivable!" burst from him, and then he shut his jaw hard, as if only one last remnant of will power kept a seething volcano, from explosion.

"What is?"

"How any girl—in Cairo, of all places!" he continued to explode in little snorts.

"You are speaking of—?" she suggested.

"Of your walking with that fellow—in broad daylight!"

"Would it have been better in the gloaming?"

The sweet restraint in the young thing\'s manner was supernatural. It was uncanny. It should have warned the red-headed young man, but oblivious of danger signals, he was plunging on, full steam ahead.

"It isn\'t as if you didn\'t know—hadn\'t been warned."

"You have been so kind," the girl murmured, and poured a cup of tea the Arab had placed at her elbow.

The young man ignored his. The color burned hotter and hotter in his face. Even his hair looked redder.

"The look he gave up here was simply outrageous—a grin of insolent triumph. I\'d like to have laid my cane across him!"

The girl\'s cup clicked against the saucer. "You are horrid!" she declared. "When we were on shipboard Captain Kerissen was very popular among the passengers and I talked with him whenever I cared to. Everyone did. Now that I am in his native city I see no reason to stalk past him when we happen to be going in the same direction. He is a gentleman of rank, a relative of the Khedive who is ruling this country—under your English advice—and he is——"

"A Turk!" gritted out the young man.

"A Turk and proud of it! His mother was French, however, and he was educated at Oxford and he is as cosmopolitan as any man I ever met. It\'s unusual to meet anyone so close to the reigning family, and it gives one a wonderful insight into things off the beaten track——"

"The beaten—damn!" said the young man, and Billy\'s heart went out to him. "Oh, I beg pardon, but you—he—I—" So many things occurred to him to say at one and the same time that he emitted a snort of warring and incoherent syllables. Finally, with supreme control, "Do you know that your \'gentleman of rank\' couldn\'t set foot in a gentleman\'s club in this country?"

"I think it\'s mean!" retorted the girl, her blue eyes very bright and indignant. "You English come here and look down on even the highest members of the country you are pretending to assist. Why do you? When he was at Oxford he went into your English homes."

"English madhouses—for admitting him."

A brief silence ensued.

The girl ate a cake. It was a nice cake, powdered with almonds, but she ate it obliviously. The angry red shone rosily in her cheeks.

The young man took a hasty drink of his tea, which had grown cold in its cup, and pushed it away. Obstinately he rushed on in his mad career.

"I simply cannot understand you!" he declared.

"Does it matter?" said she, and bit an almond\'s head off.

"It would be bad enough, in any city, but in Cairo—! To permit him to insult you with his company, alone, upon the streets!"

"When you have said insult you have said a little too much," she returned in a small, cold voice of war. "Is there anything against Captain Kerissen personally?"

"Who knows anything about any of those fellows? They are all alike—with half a dozen wives locked up behind their barred windows."

"He isn\'t married."

"How do you know?"

"I—inferred it."

The Englishman snorted: "According to his custom, you know, it isn\'t the proper thing to mention his ladies in public."

"You are frightfully unjust. Captain Kerissen\'s customs are the customs of the civilized world, and he is very anxious to have his country become modernized."

"Then let him send his sisters out walking with fellow officers.... For him to walk beside you——"

"He was following the custom of my country," said the girl, with maddening superiority. "Since I am an American girl——"

The young Englishman said a horrible thing. He said it with immense feeling.

"American goose!" he uttered, then stopped short. Precipitately he floundered into explanation:

"I beg your pardon, but, you know, when you say such bally nonsense as that—! An American girl has no more business to be imprudent than a Patagonian girl. You have no idea how these people regard——"

"Oh, don\'t apologize," murmured the girl, with charming sweetness. "I don\'t mind what you say—not in the least."

The outraged man was not so befuddled but what he saw those danger signals now. They glimmered scarlet upon his vision, but his blood was up and he plunged on to destruction with the extraordinary remark, "But isn\'t there a reason why you should?"

She gazed at him in mock reflection, as if mulling this striking thought presented for her consideration, but her eyes were too sparkly and her cheeks too poppy-pink to substantiate the reflective pose.

"N-no," she said at last, with an impertinent little drawl. "I can\'t seem to think of any."

He did not pause for innuendo. "You mean you don\'t give a piastre what I think?"

"Not half a piastre," she confirmed, in flat defiance.

The young man looked at her. He was over the brink of ruin now; nothing remained of the interesting little affair of the past three weeks but a mangled and lamentable wreck at the bottom of a deep abyss.

Perhaps a shaft of compunction touched her flinty soul at the sight of his aghast and speechless face, for she had the grace to look away. Her gaze encountered the absorbed and excited countenance of Billy B. Hill, and the poppy-pink of her cheeks became poppy-red and she turned her head sharply away. She rose, catching up her gloves and parasol.

"Thank you so much for your tea," she said in a lowered tone to her unfortunate host. "I\'ve had a delicious time.... I\'m sorry if I disappointed you by not cowering before your disapproval. Oh, don\'t bother to come in with me—I know my way to the lift and the band is going to play God Save the King and they need you to stand up and make a showing."

Billy B. Hill stared across at the abandoned young man with supreme sympathy and intimate understanding. He was a nice and right-minded young man and she was an utter minx. She was the daughter of unreason and the granddaughter of folly. She needed, emphatically needed, to be shown. But this Englishman, with his harsh and violently antagonizing way of putting things, was clearly not the man for the need. It took a lighter touch—the hand of iron in the velvet glove, as it were. It took a keener spirit, a softer humor.

Billy threw out his chest and drew himself up to his full five feet eleven and one-half inches, as he passed indoors and sought the hotel register, for he felt within himself the true equipment for that delicate mission. He fairly panted to be at it.

Fate was amiable. The hotel clerk, coerced with a couple of gold-banded ones with the real fragrance, permitted Billy to learn that the blue-eyed one\'s name was Beecher, Arlee Beecher, and that she was in the company of two ladies entitled Mrs. and Miss Eversham. The Miss Eversham was quite old enough to be entitled otherwise. They were occupied, the clerk reported, with nerves and dissatisfaction. Miss Beecher appeared occupied in part—with a correspondence that would swamp a foreign office.

Now it is always a question whether being at the same hotel does or does not constitute an introduction. Sometimes it does; sometimes it does not. When the hotel is a small and inexpensive arrangement in Switzerland, where the advertised view of the Alpenglühen is obtained by placing the chairs in a sociable circle on the sidewalk, then usually it does. When the hotel is a large and expensive affair in gayest Cairo, where the sunny and shady side rub elbows, and gamesters and débutantes and touts and school teachers and vivid ladies of conspicuous pasts and stout gentlemen of exhilarated presents abound, in fact where innocent sightseers and initiated traffickers in human frailties are often indistinguishable, then decidedly it does not.

But fate, still smiling, dropped a silver shawl in Billy\'s path as he was trailing his prey through the lounge after dinner. The shawl belonged, most palpably, to a German lady three feet ahead of him, but gripping it triumphantly, he bounded over the six feet which separated him from the Eversham-Beecher triangle and with marvelous self-restraint he touched Miss Eversham on the arm.

"You dropped this?" he inquired.

Miss Eversham looked surprisedly at Billy and uncertainly at the shawl, which she mechanically accepted. "Why I—I didn\'t remember having it with me," she hesitated.

"I noticed you were wearing one other evenings," said Billy, the Artful, "so I thought——"

"You know whether this is yours or not, don\'t you, Clara?" interposed the mother.

"They all look alike," murmured Clara Eversham, eying helplessly the silver border.

Billy permitted himself to look at Miss Beecher. That young person was looking at him and there was a disconcerting gaiety in her expression, but at sight of him she turned her head, faintly coloring. He judged she recalled his unmannerly eavesdropping that afternoon.

"Pardon—excuse me—but that is to me belonging," panted an agitated but firm voice behind them, and two stout and beringed hands seized upon the glittering shawl in Miss Eversham\'s lax grasp. "It but just now off me falls," and the German lady looked belligerent accusation upon the defrauding Billy.

There was a round of apologetic murmurs, unacknowledged by the recipient, who plunged away with her shawl, as if fearing further designs upon it. Billy laughed down at the Evershams.

"I feel like a porch climber making off with her belongings. But I had seen you with——"

"I do think I had mine this evening, after all," murmured Clara, with a questioning glance after the departing one.

"An uncultured person!" stated Mrs. Eversham.

Miss Beecher said nothing at all. Her faint smile was mockingly derisive.

"Anyway you must let me get you some coffee," Billy most inconsequentially suggested, beckoning to the red-girdled Mohammed with his laden tray, and because he was young and nice looking and evidently a gentleman from their part of the world and his evening clothes fitted perfectly and had just the right amount of braid, Mrs. Eversham made no objection to the circle of chairs he hastily collected about a taborette, and let him hand them their coffee and send Mohammed for the cream which Miss Eversham declared was indispensable for her health.

"If I take it clear I find it keeps me awake," she confided, and Billy deplored that startling and lamentable circumstance, and passed Mrs. Eversham the sugar and wondered if they could be the Philadelphia Evershams of whom he had heard his mother speak, and regretted that they were not, for then they would know who he was—William B. Hill of Alatoona, New York. He found it rather stupid traveling alone. Of course one met many Americans, but——

Mrs. Eversham took up that "but" most eagerly, and recounted multiple and deplorable instances of nasal countrywomen doing the East and monopolizing the window seats in compartments, and Miss Eversham supplied details and corrections.

Still Miss Beecher said nothing. She had a dreamy air of not belonging to the conversationalists. But from an inscrutable something in her appearance, Billy judged she was not unentertained by his sufferings.

At the first pause he addressed her directly. "And how do you like Cairo?" was his simple question. That ought, he reflected, to be an entering wedge.

The young lady did not trouble to raise her eyes. "Oh, very much," said she negligently, sipping her coffee.

"Oh, very well!" said Billy haughtily to himself. If being her fellow countryman in a strange land, and obviously a young and cultivated countryman whom it would be a profit and pleasure for any girl to know, wasn\'t enough for her—what was the use? He ought to get up and go away. He intended to get up and go away—immediately.

But he didn\'t. Perhaps it was the shimmery gold hair, perhaps it was the flickering mischief of the downcast lashes, perhaps it was the loveliness of the soft, white throat and slenderly rounded arms. Anyway he stayed. And when the strain of waltz music sounded through the chatter of voices about them and young couples began to stroll to the long parlors, Billy jumped to his feet with a devastating desire that totally ignored the interminable wanderings of Clara Eversham\'s complaints.

"Will you dance this with me?" he besought of Miss Arlee Beecher, with a direct gaze more boyishly eager than he knew.

For an agonizing moment she hesitated. Then, "I think I will," she concluded, with sudden roguery in her smile.

Stammering a farewell to the Evershams, he bore her off.

It would be useless to describe that waltz. It was one of the ecstatic moments which Young Joy sometimes tosses from her garlanded arms. It was one of the sudden, vivid, unforgettable delights which makes youth a fever and a desire. For Billy it was the wildest stab the sex had ever dealt him. For though this was perhaps the nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-ninth girl with whom he had danced, it was as if he had discovered music and motion and girls for the first time.

The music left them by the windows.

"Thank you," said Billy under his breath.

"You didn\'t deserve it," said the girl, with a faint smile playing about the corners of her lips. "You know you stared—scandalously."

Grateful that she mentioned only the lesser sin, "Could I help it?" he stammered, by way of a finished retort.

The smile deepened, "And I\'m afraid you listened!"

He stared down at her anxiously. "Will you like me better if I didn\'t?" he inquired.

"I shan\'t like you at all if you did."

"Then I didn\'t hear a word.... Besides," he basely uttered, "you were entirely in the right!"

"I should think I was!" said Arlee Beecher very indignantly. "The very notion—! Captain Kerissen is a very nice young man. He is going to get me an invitation to the Khedive\'s ball."

"Is that a very crumby affair?"

"Crumby? It\'s simply gorgeous! Everyone is mad over it. Most tourists simply read about it, and it is too perfect luck to be invited! Only the English who have been presented at court are invited and there\'s a girl at the Savoy Hotel I\'ve met—Lady Claire Montfort—who wasn\'t presented because she was in mourning for her grandmother last year, and she is simply furious about it. An old dowager here said that there ought to be similar distinctions among the Americans—that only those who had been presented at the White House ought to be recognized. Fancy making the White House a social distinction!" laughed the daughter of the Great Republic.

"I wonder," said Billy, "if I met a nice Turkish lady, whether she would get me an invitation? Then we could have another waltz——"

"There aren\'t any Turkish ladies there," uttered Miss Beecher rebukingly. "Don\'t you know that? When they are on the Continent—those that are ever taken there—they may go to dances and things, but here they can\'t, although some of them are just as modern as you or I, I\'ve heard, and lots more educated."

"You speak," he protested, "from a superficial acquaintance with my academic accomplishments."

"Are you so very—proficient?"

"I was—I am Phi Beta Kappa," he sadly confessed.

Her laugh rippled out. "You don\'t look it," she cheered.

"Oh, no, I don\'t look it," he complacently agreed. "That\'s the lamp in the gloom. But I am. I couldn\'t help it. I was curious about things and I studied about them and faculties pressed honors upon me. I am even here upon a semi-learned errand. I wanted to have a look at the diggings a friend of mine is making at Thebes and several looks at the dam at Assouan, for I am by way of being an engineer myself—a beginning engineer."

"You have been up the Nile, then?"

"Yes, I\'m just back. Now I\'m going to see something of Cairo before I leave."

"We start up the Nile day after to-morrow," said she.

"The day after—" he stopped.

\'Twas ever thus. Fate never did one good turn but she sneaked back and jabbed him unawares. She was a tricksy jade.

"That\'s—that\'s gloomy luck," said Billy, and felt outraged. "Why, how about that Khedive ball thing?"

"Oh, that\'s when we come back."

She was coming back, then. Hope lifted her head.

"When will that be?"

"In three weeks. It takes about three weeks to go up to the first cataract and back, doesn\'t it?"

"Yes, by boat," he said, adding hopefully, "but lots of people like the express trains better. They—they don\'t keep you so long on the way."

"Oh, I hate trains," said she cheerfully.

Three weeks ... Ruefully he surveyed the desolation. "I ought to be gone by then," he muttered.

A trifle startled, the girl looked up at him. As he was not looking at her, but staring moodily into what was then black vacancy, her look lingered and deepened. She saw a most bronzed and hardy looking young man, tall and broad-shouldered, with gray eyes, wide apart under straight black brows, and black hair brushed straight back from a wide forehead. She saw a rugged nose, a likeable mouth, and an abrupt and aggressive chin, saved somehow from grimness by a deep cleft in the blunt end of it.... She thought he was a very stirring looking young man. Undoubtedly he was a very sudden young man—if he meant one bit of what he intimated.

Feminine-wise, she mocked.

"What a calamity!"

"Yes, for me," said Billy squarely. "You know it\'s—it\'s awfully jolly to meet a girl from home out here!"

"A girl from home——!"

"Well, all America seems home from this place. And I shouldn\'t be surprised if we knew a lot of the same people ... You can get a good line on me that way, you know," he laughed. "Now I went to Williams and then to Boston Tech., and there must be acquaintances——"

"Don\'t!" said Arlee, with a laughing gesture of prohibition. "We probably have thousands of the same acquaintances, and you would turn out to be some one I knew everything about—perhaps the first fiancé of my roommate whose letters I used to help her answer."

"Where did you go to school?"

"At Elm Court School, near New York. For just a year."

He shook his head with an air of relief. "Never was engaged to anybody\'s roommate there.... But if you\'d rather not have my background painted——"

"Much rather not," said the girl gaily. "Why, half the romance, I mean the fun, of meeting people abroad is not knowing anything about them beforehand."

The music was beginning again. Unwillingly the remembrance of the outer world beat back into Billy\'s mind. Unhappily he became aware that the room appeared blackened with young men in evening clothes, staring ominously his way.

Squarely he stood in front of the girl. "I think this is the encore to our dance," he told her with a little smile.

She shook her pretty head laughingly at him—and then yielded to his clasping hands. "But we must dance back to the Evershams," she demurred. "It is time for us to go to our concert."

But Billy had no intention of relinquishing her before the music ceased. It was a one step, and it carried them with it in a gaiety of rhythm to which the girl gave herself with the light-hearted abandon of a romping child. Her light feet seemed scarcely to brush the floor; the delicate flush of her cheeks deepened with the stirring blood; her lips parted breathlessly over white little teeth, and when her eyes, intensely blue, met Billy\'s, the smile in them quickened in sparkling radiance. She was the very spirit of the dance; she was Youth and Joy incarnate. And the heart behind the white shirt bosom near which her fairy hair was floating began to pitch and toss like a laboring ship in the very devil of a sea.

"I think I\'ll go up the Nile again," said Billy irrelevantly.

She laughed elfishly at him, her head swaying faintly with the rhythm.

"Three weeks," said Billy under his breath, "that\'s twenty-one days—at ten dollars a day. Now I wonder how many hours—or moments—that rash outlay would assure?"

"You miser! You calculating——"

"You have to calculate—when you\'re an engineer."

"But to be sure spoils the charm! Now I—I do things on impulse."

"If you will only have the impulse to dance with me—on the Nile——"

"Why not risk it?" she challenged lightly, arrant mischief in her eyes. She added, in mocking tone, "There\'s a moon."

"That\'s a clincher," said he, with an air of decision. A faint question dwelt in the look she gave him. It was ridiculous to think he meant anything he was saying, but—she felt suddenly a little confused and shy under that light-hearted young gaiety which took every man\'s friendly admiration happily for granted.

In silence they finished the dance, and this time the music failed them when they were near the wide entrance to the room where the Evershams, beckoning specters, were standing.

"I\'m keeping them waiting," said the girl, with a note of concern which she had not shown over her performance in that line earlier in the day. But Billy had no time for humorous comparisons.

"When can I see you again?" he demanded bluntly. "Can I see you to-morrow?"

"To-morrow is a very busy day," she parried.

"But the evening——?"

"I shall be here," she admitted.

"And could I—could I take you—and the Evershams, of course—somewhere, anywhere, you\'d like to go? If there\'s any other concert——"

She shook her head. "We leave bright and early the next morning, and I know Mrs. Eversham will want her rest. I think they would rather stay here in the hotel after dinner."

"But you will keep a little time for me?" Billy urged. "Of course, staying in the same hotel, I can\'t take my hat and go and make a formal call on you—but that\'s the result I\'m after."

They had paused, to finish this colloquy, a few feet away from the ladies, who were regarding with dark suspicion this interchange of lowered tones.

Suddenly Arlee raised her eyes and gave Billy a quick look, questioning, shyly serious.

"I shall be here—and you can call on me," she promised, and bade him farewell.

She left him deliriously, inexplicably, foolishly in spirits. He plunged his hands in his pockets and squared his shoulders; he wanted to whistle, he wanted to sing, he wanted to do anything to vent the singular hilarity which possessed him.

Then he saw, across the room, a sandy-haired young man regarding him with dour intentness, and the spectacle, instead of feeding his joy, sent conjecturing chills down his spine. His bubble was pricked. Suppose, ran the horrid thought, suppose she was simply paying off the Englishman? Girls, even blue-eyed, angel-haired girls of cherubic aspect, have not been unknown to perform such deeds of darkness! And this particular girl had mischief in her eyes.... The thought was unpleasantly likely. What had he, Billy B. Hill, of New York—State—to offer to casual view worthy of competition with the presumable advantages of a young Englishman whose sister was staying with a Lady Claire? Perhaps the fellow himself had a title....

Considerably dashed, he went out to consult the register upon that point.