She stretched out her hands also, but there was all the world between his almost pathetic appeal and her almost amused repulse.
"You must make haste and find the ducat, Jim. I feel sure that without it--and especially in his present mood--father will never consent----"
He certainly did not seem in a consenting frame of mind as he came out to them with the offending letter from Hausmann in his hand.
"I've answered it," he said, sternly, "but as the man is an ass, he will most likely miss the point, which is, of course, Kapala's description of this coin. He says distinctly that it has one profile superimposed on another with the legend beneath, and the date below the flower on the obverse. Really, child, I think I will get you to figure it for me, since Hausmann seems unable to understand words."
"You could use the handsome goatherd as a model, you know," remarked Jim Forrester, vaguely surprised at his own irritation; "your father said his features were Scythic."
"Yes!" assented the numismatist, abstractedly, as he tried to re-read part of the offending missive by the distant light of the lamp; "rather an uncommon type in India, nowadays, though one sees it elsewhere. Queenie has it partly--your mother had Russian blood in her, you know."
"Perhaps that is why I feel so interested in Khesroo," said the girl, looking coldly askance at her lover.
"Oh, by the way," put in her father, breaking in on his own indignation and the silence which ensued between those two who loved each other--a silence which both felt to be at once incomprehensible yet inevitable, intolerable yet in a way rascinating--"that reminds me. The orderlies reported he was bad with fever to-night. Send him over some more quinine."
"I'll take it, if you like," said Jim Forrester, faintly penitent.
She looked at the two men with disdainful tolerance. "I will see him first. One never knows what these people call fever--it may be pneumonia."