ghed.... But it's no rumor that he
disappeared. He's gone, all right, and nobody knows where he went,
and nobody seems to want to know. Officially they said he was
drowned out swimming--or lost in a sandstorm riding in the
desert--or spiked on top of an obelisk or something equally
reasonable--but, privately, people say other things.... No
international law intrudes into the Turkish woman question."

"What of it?" Falconer looked stubborn. "I daresay the fellow
received his deserts.... But the case hardly applies--what?"

"Well--it makes one feel that anything can happen here--that the
city is quicksand where a chance step would engulf one." Billy
stared frowningly out on the vivid street ahead of him. A pretty
English bride and her soldier husband were out exercising their
dogs. Two ladies in a victoria were advertising their toilettes. A
blond baby toddled past with his black nurse. It was all very
peaceful and charming. It did not look like quicksand.... Into the
picture came a one-eyed man with a stuffed crocodile on his head,
stalking slowly along, scanning the veranda with his single,
penetrating eye, calling his wares in harsh gutturals, and with him
came suddenly the sense of that strange background before which all
this bright tourist life was played, that dark watching, secret
East, curious and incalculable.

Falconer folded his paper with a sharp crackle that recalled young
Hill's wandering thought. "That's all very well, but it doesn't
apply," he observed, with conviction.

"Then where is she?" Billy was bluntly belligerent.

The other put his paper in his pocket. "In Alexandria, to be sure,
and not at all pleased, either, to have you bring her name into such
questioning." He looked squarely at Billy as he said that, and the
eyes of the two young man met and exchanged a secret challenge of
hostility.

Billy rose. "Oh, all right," he returned. "I daresay I am as much a
fool as you take me for.... She may be all right. But if not--I
thought I'd give you a chance to take a hand in it."

"The sporting chance," said Falconer, with an appreciable smile.
"I'm much obliged--but I don't at all share your misgivings.... And
what in the world do you propose to do about it?"

For a minute Billy's gaze blankly interrogated the sunlit distances.
His eyes were fixed, but empty; his forehead knitted in an uncertain
frown. Then quite suddenly he turned and flashed at Falconer a look
of odd and unforeseen decision.