“Eustace!” she cried again. “It is I!”
He stood as if turned to stone. Mrs. Greyne hesitated, started, moved forward to the dais, and stared upon the Ouled, who had also ceased from dancing, and looked strangely surprised, even confused, by the great novelist’s intrusion.
“Miss Verbena!” she exclaimed. “Miss Verbena in Algiers!”
“Eugenia!” said Mr. Greyne in a husky voice, “what is this you say? This lady is the Ouled.”
A sardonic laugh came from the doorway. They turned. There stood Abdallah Jack. He advanced roughly to the Ouled.
“Come,” he said angrily. “Have we not earned the money of the stranger? Have we not earned enough? To-morrow you shall marry me as you have promised, and we will return to our own land, to the canal where you and I were born. And nevermore shall the Levantine instruct the babes of the English devils, but dwell veiled and guarded in the harem of her master.”
“Mademoiselle Verbena!” said Mr. Greyne in a more husky voice. “But—but—your dying mother?”
“She sleeps, monsieur, in the white sands of Ismailia, beside the bitter lake. I trust that madame can now go on with the respectable ‘Catherine.’”
And with an ironic reverence to Mrs. Eustace Greyne she placed her hand in Abdallah Jack’s and vanished from the room.
“Catherine’s Repentance,” published in a gigantic volume not many weeks ago, was preceded by Mr. Eustace Greyne’s. When last heard of he was seated in the magnificent library of the corner house in Park Lane next to the Duke of Ebury’s, busily engaged in pasting the newspaper notices of Mrs. Greyne’s greatest work into a superb new album.