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Thus, therefore, things fell out, and such was the precise situation when Mrs. Greyne flicked a crumb from her chocolate brocade gown, tied her bonnet strings, and rose from table to set forth to the Kasbah with Abdallah Jack.

It was a radiant night. In the clear sky the stars shone brilliantly, looking down upon the persistent convulsions of the little chasseur, who had not yet recovered from his attack of merriment on learning who Mrs. Greyne was. The sea, quite calm now that the great novelist was no longer upon it, lapped softly along the curving shores of the bay. The palm-trees of the town garden where the band plays on warm evenings waved lazily in the soft and scented breeze. The hooded figures of the Arabs lounged against the stone wall that girdles the sea-front. In the brilliantly-illuminated restaurants the rich French population gathered about the little tables, while the withered beggars stared in upon the oyster shells, the champagne bottles, and the feathers in the women’s audacious hats.

When Mrs. Greyne emerged upon the pavement before the Grand Hotel, attended by Mrs. Forbes and the guide, she paused for a moment, and cast a searching glance upon the fairy scene. In this voluptuous evening and strange environment life seemed oddly dreamlike. She scarcely felt like Mrs. Greyne. Possibly Mrs. Forbes also felt unlike herself, for she suddenly placed one hand upon her left side, and tottered. Abdallah Jack supported her. She screamed aloud.

“Madam!” she said. “It is the vertigo. I am overtook!”

She was really ill; her face, indeed, became the colour of a plover’s egg.

“Let me go to bed, madam,” she implored. “It is the vertigo, madam. I am overtook!”

Under ordinary circumstances Mrs. Greyne would have prescribed a dose of Kasbah air, but to-night she felt strange, and she wanted strangeness. Mrs. Forbes with the vertigo, in a small carriage, would be inappropriate. She, therefore, bade her retire, mounted into the vehicle with Abdallah Jack, and was quickly driven away, her bonnet strings floating upon the winsome wind.

“You know my husband?” she asked softly of the guide.

Abdallah Jack replied in French that he rather thought he did.

“How is he looking?” continued Mrs. Greyne in a slightly yearning voice. “My Eustace!” she added to herself, “my devoted one!”

“Monsieur Greyne is pale as washed linen upon the Kasbah wall,” replied Abdallah Jack, lighting a cigarette, and wreathing the great novelist in its grey-blue smoke. “He is thin as the Spahi’s lance, he is nervous as the leaves of the eucalyptus-tree when the winds blow from the north.”

Mrs. Greyne was seriously perturbed.

“Would I had come before!” she murmured, with serious self-reproach.

“Monsieur Greyne is worse than all the English,” pursued Abdallah Jack in a voice that sounded to Mrs. Greyne decidedly sinister. “He is worse than the tourists of Rook, who laugh in the doorways of the mosques and twine in their hair the dried lizards of the Sahara. Even the guide of Rook rejected him. I only would undertake him because I am full of evil.”

Mrs. Greyne began to feel distinctly uncomfortable, and to wish she had not been so ready to pander to Mrs. Forbes’ vertigo. She stole a sidelong glance at her strange companion. The carriage was small. The end of his bristling black moustache was very near. What he said of Mr. Greyne did not disturb her, because she knew that her Eustace had sacrificed his reputation to do her service; but what he said about himself was not reassuring.

“I think you must be doing yourself an injustice,” she said in a rather agitated voice.

“Madame?”

“I do not believe you are so bad as you imply,” she continued.

The carriage turned with a jerk out of the brilliantly-lighted thoroughfare that runs along the sea into a narrow side street, crowded with native Jews, and dark with shadows.

“Madame does not know me.”

The exact truth of this observation struck home, like a dagger, to the mind of Mrs. Greyne.