"Good heavens!" I stared blankly at Anthony, seeing not his dark face under the green turban, but that everlasting, ever-smiling newspaper block portrait. Down toppled our castle in the air, Anthony's and mine—the shining castle which had been the lodestone of my journey to Egypt, the secret hope and romance of our two lives, for all those months since Anthony first read the Ferlini papers and began negotiations with the Egyptian Government.
"It's all up then," I said, when I felt that I could speak without betraying palsy of the jaw. "We're done!"
"I'm not sure of that," Fenton answered. "If I had been, I shouldn't have broken the news so brutally. It's on the cards that we may be able to bring the thing off yet."
"But how, if that bounder has got the place for himself? He must have found out the truth about it somehow, or he wouldn't have bothered. And if he knows what we know—or think we know—he certainly won't give up to us what he's grabbed for himself. A beastly shame we should have been let in like this, after being given to understand that it would be all right."
"Lark must have had a pull of some sort, I haven't learned what; but I will. The one hope is, that he hasn't stumbled onto the secret."
"What! You think he hit on our pitch by a mere coincidence—an accident?"
"No. There's not a shadow of doubt that he had a special motive for wanting our mountain and no other." "Have you formed an idea what the motive is, if not the same as ours?"
"I've heard his version from his own lips. It's rather astounding. And I want you to hear it from him, too."
"You've met him!"
"Yesterday at Shepheard's, before I went in for this dressing-up business. Lark heard I had wired for a room at the hotel, and was lying in wait for me on the terrace when I got back from the Agency. We had a talk. I'd heard just before, the news about the mountain. But he explained. Now he wants to see you. He's got something special to say, and I've made an appointment for you with him at two o'clock."