Late as he went to sleep, Billy B. Hill was up in good season that Sunday morning. The need for cautioning Fritzi Baroff haunted him, and he was not satisfied until he had had breakfast with that lively young lady and laid down the law to her upon the situation.

She was very loath not to talk about herself at first. She wanted to tell her tale to the papers and see if one of them would be hardy enough to publish the story of the outrageous incarceration; she wanted to cable the Viennese theater where she had played of her sensational detention—in short, she wanted to get all the possible publicity out of her durance vile and to advertise her small person from Cairo to the Continent.

But Billy was urgent. "You just bide a wee on this publicity stunt," he demanded. "Cable your manager and press agent all you want to—but don\'t talk around the hotel here—and whatever you do and whatever you say, keep Miss Beecher\'s name and mine out of it."

He was very decided about that, and because she was very grateful to him and because she liked him and because she lacked other friends and other pocketbooks, the little Viennese held her tongue as directed. And she borrowed as much money as Billy would lend her, and drove off to the small shops which were open that day, and found a frock or two and a hat which she declared passable, and returned transfigured to the hotel and rendered the table where she lunched with Billy, with the air of possessing him, quite the most conspicuous in the room. The ladies gazed past them with chill eyes; the men stared covertly, with the surreptitious envy with which even the most virtuous of men surveys a lucky devil. And Billy sadly perceived that he was acquiring a reputation.

He did not blame Miss Falconer for turning haughtily aside as he and his vivid companion went past them in the veranda. But he did think her disdainful lack of memory a little overdone.

His cheeks were still red as he looked away from her and encountered the direct eyes of the girl who followed her.

"Oh, how do you do, Mr. Hill?" said Lady Claire, as clear as a bell. "It\'s such a nice day, isn\'t it?" she added, a little breathlessly, as she went by.

"It\'s much better than it was," said Billy, and he turned back to open the door for her.

"Claire!" said Miss Falconer from within.

"Coming, dear," said Lady Claire, and with a little smile of defiant friendliness at the young American she was gone.

But the memory of that plucky little smile stayed right with Billy. The girl liked him, she liked him in spite of his unknown antecedents, his preposterous picture, his conspicuous companion. She had a mind of her own, that tall English girl with the lovely eyes and the proud mouth. In a warm surge of friendliness his thoughts went out to her, and he wished vaguely that he could let her know how fine he thought she was.

Within an hour that vague wish came true. He had packed Fritzi off, with a newly acquired maid, for a drive up and down the safe public streets and he had re-interviewed the one-eyed man and the native chauffeur that the one-eyed man introduced for the evening\'s work, and he was at one of the public desks in the writing room, inditing a letter to his aunt, which, he whimsically appreciated, might be his last mortal composition, and reflecting thankfully that it was highly unnecessary to make a will, when Lady Claire strolled into the room and over to a desk.

She tried a pen frowningly, and Billy jumped to offer another. "Oh, thank you," she said. She seemed not to have seen him before.

"That was rather nice of you, you know," he said gravely.

She looked up at him.

"I\'m not really a wolf," he continued, the gravity surrendering to his likable, warm smile, "and I\'m glad you recognized it."

Her reply took him unawares. "I think you\'re splendid," said Lady Claire. "I thought so in the bazaars when you came to my help and stood up to that beastly German."

"Oh, he wasn\'t such a beastly German, after all," Billy deprecated. "And here I\'ve had a message to you from him and never remembered to give it. The fellow called on me the next morning in gala attire and offered every apology and satisfaction in his power—even the satisfaction of the duel, if I desired it. I didn\'t. But I promised to express his deep apologies to you. He was horribly shocked at himself. He\'d been drinking, he said, to forget a \'sadness\' which possessed him. His lady love had failed to keep her tryst and life was very dark."

"I don\'t wonder at her," said Lady Claire unforgivingly. "I\'m sure he must have been horrid to her!"

"I rather think she was horrid to him," Billy reflected, "although she was a very sprightly looking lady love. He showed me her picture in the back of his watch.... By George!" he uttered violently.

"What is it?"

"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. But there wasn\'t a notion in the back of his honest head as to the picture he was making in Lady Claire\'s eyes as he leaned, long-limbed, broad-shouldered, lazily at ease against the desk, his gray eyes very bright between their dark lashes, his dark hair sweeping back from his wide forehead.

"Are you sure?" she asked of him, with the smile that he drew from her. "Is it the inspiration for another picture?"

"No, no—that was my first and my last. That was the one purple bloom of my art. I have laid my brushes by.... But I\'m keeping you from that letter you were going to write."

"It\'s just a few lines for Miss Falconer," Lady Claire unnecessarily explained. "We are going to drive out to the Gezireh Palace Hotel for tea, and she thought her brother might like to go out with us if he came in in time."

She did not add why Miss Falconer was unable to write her own notes, but slanted her blue-hatted head over the desk and then hastily blotted her brief lines and tucked the sheet into an envelope. Hesitantly she looked up at Billy.

"Have you been out to the Gezireh Palace?" she very innocently inquired.

"Alone," said Billy.

"It\'s very jolly there," said she. "It\'s so gay—and the music is quite good."

"H\'m," meditated Billy. "The condemned man ate a hearty tea of Orange Pekoe and cress sandwiches," he reflected silently. He also reflected that Miss Falconer would be furious—and that invited him—and that time was interminable and that this expedition was as good a way of getting through the afternoon as any other. Thereupon he turned to the English girl, with a humorous challenge in his gaze. "I wonder if you and Miss Falconer would let this be my tea party?" he suggested.

"Miss Falconer will be delighted," said Lady Claire mendaciously.

The traces of that delight, however, lay beneath so well schooled an exterior that they were decidedly non-apparent. Nor did Robert Falconer\'s mien reveal any hint of joy when he returned to the hotel and found the two ladies starting with Billy. He joined them with rather the air of a watch dog, but that air soon wore away during the long drive under the spell of young Hill\'s frank friendliness and gay good humor. For Billy was extravagantly in spirits. Excitement stirred in him like wine; his blood was on fire with thoughts of the evening.

"It\'s the fool lark of the thing," he said, half apologetically, to Falconer\'s wonder when the two young men were alone for a minute on the Gezireh verandas. "Didn\'t you ever want to be a pirate?"

The red-headed young man nodded. "Yes, but this business doesn\'t make me feel like a pirate—more like a second-story man!"

"I\'ve left letters with Fritzi Baroff," said Hill, "and if we\'re not back by morning, she\'s to go to the authorities with them."

"That won\'t do us any good," said the Englishman grimly.

But after the ladies returned it was a very merry-seeming tea party. Even Miss Falconer unbent to the artist, as she persisted in calling Billy, though he had dutifully enlightened her that engineering was his true and proper life work, and art but a random diversion, and she promised to show him the sketches which she had been making, and piled him with questions about his mysterious America.

And Lady Claire was very prettily animated, and rallied Falconer upon his absent-mindedness and told Billy tales of her English home and how her father had threatened to change the name of the Hall to M?dchenheim because there were five daughters of them. "Five girls near an age, Mr. Hill, and all poor as church mice!" she had blithely asserted.

But from what Billy heard of balls and hunters and "seasons," he gleaned that being poor as church mice, for these five titled girls, meant merely an effort in keeping up with the things they felt should be theirs by right divine. And as Billy listened, feeling the force of the girl\'s attraction, the charm of her serene confidence and the pleasant air of security and well-being that hedged her in, he stole a covert glance at Falconer\'s unrevealing countenance and reflected that it was rather a stormy day for that young man when he became entangled with the fortunes of little Miss Beecher. It was also a stormy day for himself, but he felt that storms belonged more naturally to his adventurous lot.

But it was characteristic of Falconer when once committed to a plan not to open his mind to the objections which besieged it. So that night, at the fall of dark, as the two young men motored forth together, he maintained a stolid resolution which refused to look back. The approach of the danger was tuning up his nerves, and whatever his common sense might think about it, his youth and pluck greeted the adventure with a quickening heart and a rash warmth of blood.

Both young men were resolute and confident. Either would have been more than human if he had not looked a trifle askance upon the other and wished to thunder that he had been able to go into it alone and to have tasted the intoxication of delivering the girl single-handed out of the den of thieves. But the success of the plan was paramount, as Billy reminded himself.

He found himself hoping wildly that she would see him as well as Falconer.

"She has probably forgotten all about me," he thought ruefully. "She won\'t remember that dance with me, nor that chat next morning. I\'m just an Also Met. She won\'t even perceive me. She\'ll see that sandy-haired deliverer—and she\'ll tell him how right he was and how good to come after her——"

Thus jealousy darkly painted his undoing. "But, darn it, I had to ask him!" Thus he downed his ungenerous thoughts. "It needed two men at least—and besides, I don\'t want any handicap of gratitude in this."

They left the automobile in the Mohammedan graveyard with exact and impressive instructions. And then they stole back among the gloomy trees and ghostly tombs to where the canal washed the foot of the little terraces, and there the one-eyed man sat waiting in the canoe, a figure of profound misanthropy.

Silently he lifted a stricken but set countenance, and they climbed in and the three paddled off, approaching the back of the............