“He is a cousin of the Consul,” urged Dicky. “Cousin—what cousin? I never heard—he never told me that.”
“Oh, nobody tells anything in Egypt, unless he’s kourbashed or thumb-screwed. It’s safer to tell nothing, you know.”
“Cousin! I didn’t know there were Kingsleys in that family. What reason could the Consul have for hiding the relationship?”
“Well, I don’t know, you must ask Kingsley. Flamboyant and garrulous as he is, he probably won’t tell you that.”
“If I saw Kingsley Bey, I should ask him questions which interest me more. I should prefer, however, to ask them through a lawyer—to him in the prisoner’s dock.”
“You dislike him intensely?”
“I detest him for what he has done; but I do not despise him as you suggest I should. Flamboyant, garrulous—I don’t believe that. I think him, feel him, to be a hard man, a strong man, and a bad man—if not wholly bad.”
“Yet you would put him in the prisoner’s dock,” interposed Kingsley musingly, and wondering how he was to tell her that Lord Selden and Kingsley Bey were one and the same person.
“Certainly. A man who commits public wrongs should be punished. Yet I am sorry that a man so capable should be so inhuman.”
“Your grandfather was inhuman,” put in Kingsley. “He owned great West Indian slave properties.