her predicament--perhaps indeed a retributive
feeling of its fitness for her folly. They were annoyed.... Packing
her clothes must have been a bother--so was paying her hotel bill.

She crumpled the telegram with an angry little hand. Evidently they
had done none of the telephoning she had begged of them. Surely
there would have been time for that, if only they had hurried a
little! She remembered with a sort of hopeless rage their maddening
deliberateness.... Well, they were gone off to the Nile--the
telegram, she saw, had been sent as they were on their way to the
boat--and she had nothing more to hope from them! But surely the
other people, the consul, the ambassador, the mysterious medical
authorities, would understand when they had read her letters.

She sent another note to the Captain, asking to be called when the
doctor came, and then she sat down at the little white table and
began again to write.

But not to Falconer. Never would she beg of him, never, she
resolved, with a tightening of her soft lips. She would never let
him know how miserable she was over this stupid scrape; when she
returned to the hotel she would carry affairs with a high hand and
hold forth upon the interesting quaintness of her experience and the
old-world charm of her hostess. She laughed, in angry mockery. Never
to him, after their quarrel, would she confess herself.

The letter was to a young man whose gray eyes she remembered as very
kind and whose chin as very vigorous. He would do things, she
thought. And he would understand--he was an American. And dimly she
felt that she didn't want him to think she had utterly forgotten
her promise of the evening before last, and she didn't want him to
be filled with whatever dismal impression the Evershams were giving
out. So she dwelt very lightly upon her annoyance at being detained,
and asked him please to see the consul or the English Ambassador or
somebody in power and hurry matters up a little, as her rightful
caretakers had taken themselves off to the Nile. And she said
nothing stupid about the strangeness of her writing to him after
only speaking to him twice and never being really presented. She
merely added, "Please hurry things--I hate being a prisoner," and
sealed and addressed it with a flourish to William B. Hill, and sent
it off by the maid, and felt oddly comforted by the memory of
Billy's vigorous chin.

The heat of the rose-and-white room was stifling now as the slant
su