Abdallah Jack replied in French that he rather thought he did.
“How is he looking?” continued Mrs. Greyne in a slightly yearning voice. “My Eustace!” she added to herself, “my devoted one!”
“Monsieur Greyne is pale as washed linen upon the Kasbah wall,” replied Abdallah Jack, lighting a cigarette, and wreathing the great novelist in its grey-blue smoke. “He is thin as the Spahi’s lance, he is nervous as the leaves of the eucalyptus-tree when the winds blow from the north.”
Mrs. Greyne was seriously perturbed.
“Would I had come before!” she murmured, with serious self-reproach.
“Monsieur Greyne is worse than all the English,” pursued Abdallah Jack in a voice that sounded to Mrs. Greyne decidedly sinister. “He is worse than the tourists of Rook, who laugh in the doorways of the mosques and twine in their hair the dried lizards of the Sahara. Even the guide of Rook rejected him. I only would undertake him because I am full of evil.”
Mrs. Greyne began to feel distinctly uncomfortable, and to wish she had not been so ready to pander to Mrs. Forbes’ vertigo. She stole a sidelong glance at her strange companion. The carriage was small. The end of his bristling black moustache was very near. What he said of Mr. Greyne did not disturb her, because she knew that her Eustace had sacrificed his reputation to do her service; but what he said about himself was not reassuring.
“I think you must be doing yourself an injustice,” she said in a rather agitated voice.
“Madame?”
“I do not believe you are so bad as you imply,” she continued.