“It’s amusing, isn’t it? A careless and innocent word to that old busybody, Ahmed Mirka Pasha, at my table—that began it. Then another word to Izzet Bey. And I had scarcely time to realise what had happened—barely time to telegraph James in New York—before their entire underground machinery was set in motion to seize those wretched papers in Brookhollow!”
“You don’t know even yet, Princess, how amazingly fast that machinery worked.”
“Tell me now, James. I have time enough to write my warning since it is already too late.” And she seated herself on the sofa and drew Ruhannah down beside her.
“Listen, dear,” she said with pretty mockery, “here is a most worthy young man who is simply dying to let us know how picturesque a man can be when he tries to.”
Neeland laughed:
“The only trouble with me,” he retorted, “is that I’ve a rather hopeless habit of telling the truth. Otherwise there’d be some chance for me as a hero in what I’m going to tell you.”
And he began with his first encounter with Ilse Dumont in Rue Carew’s house at Brookhollow. After he had been speaking for less than a minute, Rue Carew’s hands tightened in the clasp of the Princess Naïa, who glanced at the girl and noticed that she had lost her colour.
And Neeland continued his partly playful, partly serious narrative of “moving accidents by flood and field,” aware of the girl’s deep, breathless interest, moved by it, and, conscious of it, the more inclined to avoid the picturesque and heroic, and almost ashamed to talk of himself at all under the serious beauty of the girl’s clear eyes.
But he could scarcely tell his tale and avoid mentioning himself; he was the centre of it all, the focus of the darts of Fate, and there was no getting away from what happened to himself.