The Palace of Darkened Windows | Page 2

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