“That is easily explained: we have been teaching her English for some time, I regret to say, for the purpose of making her more of a companion to my daughter, who is fond of her sprightly ways. I knew that she was not quite so good a girl as I could have wished, but had no idea she was so deceitful. Go, find Rais Ali at once, and put him on his guard,” said Mrs Langley, as she left the seaman and returned to the house.
Now, if there ever was a man who could not understand either how to deceive, or to guard against deception, or to do otherwise than take a straight course, that man was Ted Flaggan, and yet Ted thought himself to be an uncommonly sharp deceiver when occasion required.
Having received the caution above referred to, he thrust his hands into his coat-pockets, and with a frowning countenance went off in search of Rais Ali. Mariner-like, he descried him afar on the horizon of vision, as it were, bearing down under full sail along a narrow path between two hedges of aloes and cactus, which led to the house.
By a strange coincidence, Agnes and her friend came bounding out into the shrubbery at that moment, having finished their brief luncheon, and Ziffa chanced to catch sight of the stout mariner as he hastened to meet his friend.
With the intuitive sharpness of an Eastern mind she observed the fact, and with the native acuteness of a scheming little vixen, she guessed that something might turn up. Acting on the thought, she shouted—
“Wait a little, Agnes; I will hide: you shall find me.”
Innocent Agnes obediently waited, while Ziffa ran down the wrong side of the cactus hedge, and kept up with the seaman—a little in rear of him.
“Ho! Ally Babby,” shouted Ted Flaggan, when he was within hail—it might be a hundred yards or so—of his friend, “what d’ee think? that little brown-faced chip of Hadji Baba has been up here eavesdropping, and has got to windward of us a’most. Leastwise she knows enough o’ the Riminis to want to know more—the dirty little spalpeen.”
“Thank you,” thought Ziffa, as she listened.
When Flaggan had varied his remarks once or twice, by way of translating them, Rais Ali shook his head.