Gervase glanced him up and down, taking note of his pale face and wild eyes with a certain good-humored regret and compassion.
“Say on, my friend.”
Denzil looked straight at him, biting his lips hard and clenching his hands in the effort to keep down some evidently violent emotion.
“The Princess Ziska,” he began,—
Gervase smiled, and flicked the ash off his cigarette.
“The Princess Ziska,” he echoed,—“Yes? What of her? She seems to be the only person talked about in Cairo. Everybody in this hotel, at any rate, begins conversation with precisely the same words as you do,—‘the Princess Ziska!’ Upon my life, it is very amusing!”
“It is not amusing to me,” said Denzil, bitterly. “To me it is a matter of life and death.” He paused, and Gervase looked at him curiously. “We’ve always been such good friends, Gervase,” he continued, “that I should be sorry if anything came between us now, so I think it is better to make a clean breast of it and speak out plainly.” Again he hesitated, his face growing still paler, then with a sudden ardent light glowing in his eyes he said—“Gervase, I love the Princess Ziska!”
Gervase threw away his cigarette and laughed aloud with a wild hilarity.
“My good boy, I am very sorry for you! Sorry, too, for myself! I deplore the position in which we are placed with all my heart and soul. It is unfortunate, but it seems inevitable. You love the Princess Ziska,—and by all the gods of Egypt and Christendom, so do I!”