He smoked many a pipe over it that night, his feet on the open window ledge, his eyes on the far-spreading flat roofs, the distant domes and minarets darkly silhouetted against the sky of softest, deepest blue. The stars were silver bright. They spangled the heaven with the radiance they never give to northern skies; they gleamed like bright, wild creatures on their unearthly revels.... It would be glorious camping in the desert on a night like this ... Heaven be praised, he had not bought that berth ... Alexandria ... the Maynards ... the desert ...
He knocked out the ashes from his last pipe and rose briskly. His decision was made, but its success was on the knees of the great god Luck.
CHAPTER VII
BILLY HAS HIS DOUBTS
The encounter in the bazaars that Thursday afternoon brought one more result to young Hill besides the bruise upon his chin and the privilege of bowing to Lady Claire and her vigilant chaperon, and the presence of Lady Claire's little handkerchief in his coat pocket.
It brought a young German, scrupulously sober, soberly apologetic, in formal state to Billy's hotel upon Friday morning, whose card announced him to be Frederick von Deigen and whose speech proclaimed him to be utterly aghast at his own untoward behavior.
"I was not myself," he owned, with a sigh and a melancholy twist of his upstanding mustaches. "I had been lunching alone—and it is bad to lunch alone when one has a sadness. One drinks—to forget.... But you are too young to understand." He waved his hand in compliment to Billy's youth, then continued, with increasing energy, "But when I find what dummheit I have done—how I have so rudely addressed the young Fräulein with you, and have used my fists upon you, even to the point of hurling you upon the street—I have no words for my shame."
"Oh, it wasn't exactly a hurl," Billy easily amended. "There was a banana peel where my heel happened to be—and I wasn't half scrapping. I could see you weren't yourself."