friend, you know that."

Gregorio flushed angrily at the woman's words, but he knew quite well
it was no use replying to them, for she was speaking only the truth. But
the knowledge that he had betrayed his secret annoyed him. He had grown
used to the facts and could look at them easily enough, but he had not
reckoned on others also learning them.

He determined to go out and find work, or at any rate to tramp the
streets pretending to look for something to do. The woman became
intolerable to him, and the Penny-farthing Shop, reeking with the odour
of stale tobacco and spilled liquor, poisoned him. He took up his hat
brusquely and stepped into the street.

Madam Marx, standing at the door, laughed at him as she called out,
"Good-bye, Gregorio; when will you come back?"

He did not answer, but the sound of her laughter followed him up the
street, and he kicked angrily at the stones in his path.

At last he passed by the Ras-el-Tin barracks. He looked curiously at the
English soldiers. Some were playing polo on the hard brown space to
the left, and from the windows of the building men leaned out, their
shirt-sleeves rolled up and their strong arms bared to the sun. They
smoked short clay pipes, and innumerable little blue spiral clouds
mounted skyward. Obviously the heat did not greatly inconvenience them,
for they laughed and sang and drank oceans of beer.

The sight of them annoyed Gregorio. He looked at the pewter mugs shining
in the sunlight. He eyed greedily the passage of one from hand to hand;
and when one man, after taking a long pull, laughed and held it upside
down to show him it was empty, he burst into an uncontrollable fit of
anger, and shook his fist impotently at the soldiers, who chaffed him
good-naturedly. As he went along by the stables, a friendly lancer,
pitying him, probably, too, wearying of his own lonely watch, called to
him, and offered him a drink out of a stone bottle. Gregorio drank again
feverishly, and handed the bottle back to its owner with a grin, and
passed on without a word. The soldier watched him curiously, but said
nothing.

When he reached the lighthouse Gregorio flung himself on to the
pebble-strewn sand and looked across the bay. The blue water, calm and
unruffled as a sheet of glass, spread before him. The ships--Austrian
Lloyd mail-boats, P. and O. liners, and grimy coal-hulks--lay motionless
against the white side of the jetty.

The khedive's yacht was bright with bunti