“Pardon me,” said the middy, with a deprecatory air, “a sneeze is sometimes difficult to repress.”
“Does painting give Englishmen colds?” asked the Moor sternly.
“Sometimes it does—especially if practised out of doors in bad weather,” returned Foster softly.
“H’m! That will do for to-day. You may return to your painting in the garden. It will, perhaps, cure your cold. Go!” he added, turning to Hester, who immediately rose, pushed the paper under the cushion on which she had been sitting, and left the room with her eyes fixed on the ground.
As the cat watches the mouse, Foster had watched the girl’s every movement while he bent over his paint-box. He saw where she put the paper. In conveying his materials from the room, strange to say, he slipped on the marble floor, close to the cushion, secured the paper as he rose, and, picking up his scattered things with an air of self-condemnation, retired humbly—yet elated—from the presence-chamber.
Need we say that in the first convenient spot he could find he eagerly unrolled the paper, and read—
“I am lost! Oh, save me! Osman has come! I have seen him! Hateful! He comes to-morrow to—”
The writing ended abruptly.
“My hideous sneeze did that!” growled Foster savagely. “But if I had been a moment later Ben-Ahmed might have—well, well; no matter. She must be saved. She shall be saved!”
Having said this, clenched his teeth and hands, and glared, he began to wonder how she was to be saved. Not being able to arrive at any conclusion on this point, he went off in search of his friend Peter the Great.