The Pursuit

E-text prepared by Darleen Dove, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

It was not the muleteer's shove, slight but significant though it was, which produced John Aylmer's shrug of irritation. His resentment was directed at himself. He realized that he had been guilty of a gaucherie. For thirty seconds he had been standing halted in the main street of Tangier, a rock of obstruction to all the rabble traffic which passes between the Bab al Marsa and the Bab al Sôk, staring at—what?
At a pretty woman.
He reddened under his tan. The muleteer's shoulder had displaced him for purely practical reasons, for, indeed, almost benevolent ones, for the mules would have been capable of obtaining with their teeth what their guardian had obtained by mere weight of his body. But Aylmer felt that by accepted social standards a kick would not have been more than his due. Had he not been behaving like some cub of a cockney clerk at an Earl's Court Exhibition? His lips moved. He was muttering excuses of himself to himself, and knew that they were valid, but that an onlooker would have had no clue to them.
For it was not her prettiness which had drawn his attention to the girl. It took no second glance to assure him that she was no countrywoman of his, but an American. Her features had the clean regularity, her complexion the pale, unfurrowed smoothness which is kept intact on the western side of the Atlantic and there alone. The Moroccan sunlight was proving in a dozen places the mistake the shadows made when they dulled the gold of her hair to brown. Her eyes matched the waters of the unrippled bay.
Though he recognized these things, they had not, in the first place, attracted Aylmer's attention. American girls—pretty American girls—are no rarity in Tangier since Mr. Cook threw over Moghreb-al-Aksa the ægis of his protection. Under ordinary circumstances he would have looked, approved, and, without altering his stride, passed on. But here was something which appealed to the inherited instincts of a gentleman. What was it?