The Fortieth Door | Page 6

the present, monsieur!"
"Are you enjoying it?"
Her lashes dropped, like black butterflies. She was a changeling of a girl, veering from gayety to shyness.... Her gaze was now on her wrist watch, a slender blaze of platinum and diamonds.
"The present--yes," she said in a muffled little voice.
He bent his head to hear her through the veil.
A tormenting curiosity was assailing him. It had become not enough to know that she was young and slender, with enchanting eyes and a teasing spirit of wit.... Vaguely he had thought her to be French, one of the quaint jeunes filles so rarely taken traveling.
But who was she? A child at her first ball? But what in the world was she doing, back in the palms, away from her chaperon?
He realized, even in the cloud of his fascination, that French jeunes filles are not wonted to lurk about palms at a ball.
Was she a little Cinderella, then, slipping among the guests? Some poor companion, stealing in for fun?... She was too young. And there was that watch, that glitter of diamonds upon her wrist.
"Have you just come to Cairo?"
She shook her head. "For some time--I have been here."
"Up the Nile yet?"
"The Nile--no, monsieur."
"But you are going?"
"That--that I do not know. Sometime, perhaps."
She sounded guarded.... He hurried into revelations.
"I am staying not far from Cairo, myself. I am an excavator--on an expedition from an American museum."
"Ah, you dig?"
"Well, not personally.... But the expedition digs.... We've had some bully finds."
"And you came from America--to dig in the sands?" The black domino laughed softly. "For how long, monsieur?"
"This is my second year."
Still laughing, she shook her shrouded little head at him. "But I cannot understand! What wonderful thing do you hope to find--what buried secret--?"
"Nothing half as wonderful as to know who you are," he said boldly.
"That, too, is--is buried, monsieur!"
"But not beyond discovery," he told her very gayly and confidently, and danced the music out.
As the last strains died, they paused for an instant as if the spell still bound them, then his arms fell slowly away, and he heard the girl draw a quick, startled breath. Her eyes sped to that tiny, blazing watch; when she lifted them he thought he surprised a gleam of panic.
"How fast is an hour!" she said with an excited little laugh. "Time is a--a very sudden thing!"
Sudden, indeed! How long since he had been a badly bored, impatient young man, mocking the follies of the masquerade? How long since he had danced with Jinny, flouting her notion of this sort of thing as life? How long since he had looked into a pair of dark disquieting eyes ... listened to a gay little voice....
Many important things in life happen suddenly. Juliet happened very suddenly to Romeo. Romeo happened as suddenly to Juliet.
But Jack Ryder was not remembering anything about Romeo and Juliet. He was watching that glance steal to the wrist watch again.
Then, as if with a determination of the spirit, they smiled up at him.
"Monsieur the American," said the black domino, "you have been most kind to an--an incognita--of a masque. I hope that you dig out of your sands all the secrets that you most desire."
"You sound as if you were saying good-bye," said Jack Ryder with quick denial in his blood.
The smile in her eyes flickered.
"Perhaps I have kept you too long from the other guests."
He shook his head. "They don't exist."
"Ah! I will give you the chance to say such nice things to them."
"But I never say nice things--unless I mean them!"
"Never--monsieur?"
"Never. I am very careful what I say," he assured her, even as he had assured another girl, in what different meaning, hours or centuries before. "You can believe anything that I say."
"A young man of character! Perhaps that goes with the Scotch costume. I have read the Scots are a noble people."
"They haven't a thing on the Americans. You must know me better and discover--"
But again her eyes had gone, almost guiltily, to that watch. And when she raised them again they were not smiling but very strangely resolved.
"Monsieur, it is so hot--if you would get me a glass of sherbet?"
"Certainly." Convention brought out the assent; convention turned him about and marched him dutifully toward the crowded table she indicated.
But something deeper than convention, some warning born of that too-often consulted watch and that strange look in her eyes, that uneasy fear and swift resolve, turned him quickly about again.
Other couples had strolled between them. He hurried through and stepped back among the palms.
The place was empty. The black domino was gone.
* * * * *
He wasted one minute in assuring himself that she was not hidden in some corner, not mingled with the crowd. But the niche was deserted as a rifled nest. Then his eyes spied the door that the green decorations