“Yes, so do I,” Mr. Bindane remarked. “I want him to live out there, and manage this Company I’m trying to launch. Frankly, that is why I wish you success. At present it is Lady Muriel who attracts him to Cairo; and if by any chance she should marry him, my plans would be spoilt.”
“Oh, I see,” said the other, a look of cunning coming into his red face. “So we both want the same thing.”
“Yes,” replied Mr. Bindane. The conspiracy interested him, the more so because he felt that he was acting in the best interests of Daniel, for whom he had conceived an unbounded admiration. He thought that he was wasted at the Residency: there was no money in his present work, whereas, if he entered the proposed Company’s employment, he might rise to great wealth. Nor would he ever be happy in Cairo, certainly not if he were tied to Lady Muriel: she was not the right wife for him. She was too flighty, and this escapade of hers in the desert stamped her as a woman of loose morals, who would bring only sorrow to a man of Daniel Lane’s temperament.
Lord Barthampton leaned forward. “Did she see much of him in the Oases?” he asked.
Mr. Bindane hesitated. He did not like to give the secret away; yet he felt that if this burly and rather unscrupulous young man were in possession of the facts, he might terrorize Lady Muriel into marrying him. Then Cairo would cease to have any attraction for Daniel Lane. “She saw a great deal of him,” he replied at length.
“Why, was he with your party?”
Mr. Bindane’s lips moved flabbily, but he did not speak.
“I thought you told me the other day that he wasn’t with you,” Lord Barthampton added.
“Yes, that’s so,” the other answered. “He wasn’t.”
His visitor got up suddenly from his chair. “Do you mean that she was with him?” he asked, incredulously.