with
some official's pretty wife who had the entree to a pasha's daughter
that she could be induced to make use of it for him.

Desperately he thought of remedying this defect. There were several
charming young matrons not averse to devoted young men, but the time
was short for establishing those confidential relations which were
what he required now.

Jinny Jeffries would do it for him if she could, but Jinny would not
return for another week. And if she changed her mind and took the
boat back--as he, alack! had advised--instead of the express, then
she would be longer.

And meanwhile the days were passing, four of them now since he and
McLean had heard the Soudanese locking the door behind them.

There seemed nothing for it but to trust to that idea which had been
slowly shaping in his mind.

CHAPTER IX

A WEDDING PRESENT

In a room high in the palace a young girl was trying on a frock.
Before a tall pier glass she stood indifferently, one hip sagging to
the despair of the kneeling seamstress, her face turned listlessly
from the image in the glass.

Through the open window, banded with three bars, she looked into the
rustling tops of palms, from which the yellow date fruit hung, and
beyond the palms the hot, bright, blue sky and the far towers of a
minaret.

"A bit more to the left, h'if you please, miss," the woman entreated
through a mouthful of pins, and apathetically the young figure
moved.

"A bit of h'all right, now, that drape," the woman chirped, sitting
back on her heels to survey her work.

She was an odd gnome-like figure, with a sharp nose on one side of
her head and an outstanding knob of hair on the other. Into that
knob the thin locks were so tightly strained that her pointed
features had an effect of popping out of bondage.

She was London born, brought out by an English official's wife as
dressmaker to the children, remaining in Cairo as wife of a British
corporal. Since no children had resulted to require her care and
the corporal maintained his distaste for thrift, Mrs. Hendricks had
resumed her old trade, and had become a familiar figure to many
fashionable Turkish harems, slipping in and out morning and evening,
sewing busily away behind the bars upon frocks that would have
graced a court ball, and lunching in familiar sociability with the
family, sometimes having a bey or a captain or a pasha for a
vis-a-vis when the men in the family dropped in for luncheon.

As the g