"You—you kindle poetic fires, my little one. You—I—" He stammered a moment, then forgot his fierce speech against foreign ways. "You have the raven hair—"
His hand went out to it. He smoothed it back out of her eyes, then tried to draw her to him.
Desperately she resisted. "Monsieur, one does not expect a gentleman—"
"Expect! Ho—what should one expect when a man has such a little sweetmeat, such a little syrup drop, such a rose petal—Come, come, you would not struggle—"
But it was not the struggling hand of the frightened girl that sent the general back.
It was a brown, sinewy hand on his shoulder, a hand protruding from a well tailored gray sleeve and lilac striped cuff, that caught Hamdi Bey by the epauleted shoulder and sent him spinning about.
Another hand was holding a revolver very directly at him.
"Silence!" said Jack Ryder in his best Turkish and repeated it, with amplification, in English. "Not a sound—or I'll blow your head off."
Aimée gave a strangled gasp.
He had not gone, then! He had hidden there, in some nook of that boudoir behind those shadowy curtains, waiting to protect her, to rescue....