"Then it was all a lie." Arlee's eyes fixed themselves on the dancing candle flame, swaying in the soft night air. She tried to think very coolly and collectedly, but her brain felt numb and fogged and heavy. The sight of that tortured candle flame hypnotized her. Faintly she whispered, "Then it was all—an excuse," and, at that, sharp terror, like a knife, cleaved her numbness. She turned furiously to her visitor.
"But he would not dare make it all up!"
She saw the callousness of the shrug. "Why not—he is the master here!" Her own heart echoed fearfully the words. She stammered, "But—but I wrote—I had a letter—there must——"
"What in all the world are you saying?" demanded the other. "What is this story?" and as Arlee began the quick, whispered narration she listened intently, her little dark head on one side, nodding wisely at intervals.
"So—you came to have tea," she repeated at the close, in her quaintly inflected, foreign-sounding English. "And you stay because of the plague? So?"
"But I wrote—I wrote to my friends and——"
"And gave him the letters!"
"But I had a letter from my friends—or a telegram rather." Arlee knitted her brows in furious thought. "And it sounded like her."
"Does he know her, that friend?" questioned the other and at Arlee's nod, "Then he could write it himself—that is easy on telegraph paper. He is so clever, that devil, Hamdi."
"But my friends knew where I was going"—slowly the mind turned back to trace the blind, careless steps of that afternoon. "At least he said he'd leave a note—Oh, what a fool I was!" she broke off to gasp, seeing how that forethought of his, that far-sighted remark, had prevented her from leaving a note of her own. And she remembered now, with flashing clearness, that upon her arrival he had carelessly inquired if she, too, had left a note of explanation. How lightly she had told him no! And what unguessed springs of action came perhaps from that single word! For so cleverly had the trap been swiftly prepared that if anything had gone wrong, if anyone had become aware of her intentions, it could have passed off as a visit and she would have returned to her hotel prattling joyously of her wonderful glimpse into the seclusion of Turkish aristocracy!