"But—but—no one else——?" she stammered.
There was a particularly large lump of sand in Billy B. Hill's throat just then; he cleared it heavily. "Oh, yes, some one else guessed, too," he said then. "That English friend of yours, Robert Falconer, he and I had a regular old shooting party in the palace last Sunday evening. If you'd been there then he would certainly have had you out."
"So he knows." She said it a little faintly, Billy thought, as if she was disappointed and troubled. She would know, of course, by intuition, how the Englishman would think about a scrape of that sort.
"But he doesn't know now," he said eagerly. "He is sure you are all right in Alexandria, because the Evershams received another fake telegram from you from Alexandria. The Captain was stalling them along, apparently, keeping everything under cover as long as possible. And when Falconer heard about that, his suspicions were over. He thought we'd made fools of ourselves in going to the palace."
She was silent. Looking at her, after a while, Billy saw her staring out obliviously into the darkness; her hair was hanging all about her.
His glance seemed to recall her thoughts. She started and then brushed back her hair; the sand fell from it and she took hold of one soft strand. "Look out, I'm going to shake this!" she warned, and he half shut his eyes and underneath the lids he saw her shaking her head as vigorously as a little terrier after a bath.
"Isn't it awful?" she appealed.
"I could scratch a match on my face," he confirmed.
"But tell me," she began again, "how did you know I was in that palace? And I must tell you how I happened to go and how I was kept there."
"You were told there was a quarantine, weren't you?" Billy supplied, as she hesitated.