heard. And if she looked like
her picture Tewfick probably laid himself out to be lovely to
her.... I rather like the chap, myself."

"I love him," Ryder snorted. "The infernal liar--"

"Steady now--suppose it's all the truth? Nothing impossible to it.
Fact is, I rather believe it," said McLean imperturbably. "It hangs
together. If this girl you met thinks she's his daughter, that's
conclusive. She'd have some idea--servants' gossip or family
whisperings.... And why should he have brought her up as his own?"

"No other children. And he'd grown fond of her, of course. If you
could see her!" retorted Ryder.

"Just as well, I can't.... And I think he could hardly have kept her
in the dark.... We'd better call it a wild goose chase and say the
man's telling the truth."

"If this girl were his daughter she couldn't be more than fourteen
years old. And I've seen the girl and she's eighteen if she's a
day--you might take her for twenty. _Fourteen_!" said Ryder in
repudiating scorn.

Hesitating McLean murmured something about the early maturity of the
natives.

"Natives?" Ryder flung angrily back. "This girl's French!"

"As far as we are concerned, Jack, this girl is Turkish--and
fourteen.... We can't get around that, and you had better not forget
it," his friend quietly advised. "We've done everything that we can
and there is no use working yourself up.... If anybody's to blame in
this business, I don't think it's Tewfick--he's done the handsome
thing by her--but the fool Frenchman who took his baby and his wife
into the desert, and it's too late to rag him. Cheer up, old top,
and forget it. There's nothing more to be done."

It was sound advice, Jack Ryder knew it. They had done all that they
could. McLean had been a brick. There remained nothing now but to
notify the Delcasse aunt that Tewfick Pasha claimed the child.

"And I've a notion, Jack," said McLean thoughtfully, "that he might
not have done that if you hadn't rushed him so, trying to break off
the marriage. That was what frightened him."

"I thought you said she was his own daughter," Ryder responded
indignantly, and to that McLean merely murmured, "She will be now,
to all time."

It was a haunting thought. It left Ryder with the bitter taste of
blame in his mouth, the gall and wormwood of blame and a baffled
defeat.

But for that sense of blame he might have taken McLean's advice. He
might--but for that--have gone the way of wisdom, and accepted t