e entrance he saw his clerk--the clever one--going out, and
excusing himself he went forward to detain the man. For a moment
there ensued a low-toned colloquy. Then the clerk, a dark-browned
keen-featured fellow in European clothes with a red fez, began to
relate something.

When McLean turned back to Jinny Jeffries she saw that his look was
sharply altered. There was a transfixed air about him and when he
spoke his voice told her that he had had a shock.

"My man tells me," he said, "that Hamdi Bey's bride is dead. He
buried her yesterday."

CHAPTER XXII

FROM THE BAZAARS

There was a moment's pause.

"What? That lovely girl?" said Jinny in startled pity. She added
incredulously, "Yesterday?... And only the day before--why, what
_could_ have happened?"

That was what McLean was asking himself very grimly.

Aloud he told her slowly. "They say that fire happened. Some
accident--a candle overturned in her apartments. And of course the
windows were screened--"

"_Fire_--how terrible! That lovely girl," said Jinny again. She was
genuinely horrified and pitiful, yet she found a moment to wonder at
the evident depths of McLean's consternation. For of course he had
never seen the girl.

Yet he looked utterly upset.

"It's one of the most dreadful things I ever heard of," Jinny
murmured. "On her wedding night.... And she was so young, Mr.
McLean, and so exquisite. She didn't look like a real girl.... She
was a fairy creature.... I never dreamed there _really_ were
rose-leaf skins before but hers was just like flower petals. Jack
and I talked about it, I remember. And her face had something so
bewitching about it, something so sweet and delicate--"

She broke off revisited with that vision of Aimee's sprite-like
beauty.... How little that poor girl had thought, as she stood there
in the bright splendor of her robes and diadem, that in a few hours
more--

"Oh, I hope that fire--that it was merciful--that she didn't
suffer," she said almost inaudibly.

But speech itself was too definitive of horrors.

"It's tragic," she finished simply.

It was tragic, with a complicated tragedy, thought Andrew McLean as
he stood there, his eyes narrowing, his lips compressed, his mind
invaded with a dark swarm of conjecture, surmise, suspicion, his
vision possessed by a flitting rush of pictures.

He saw Jack talking with the girl at the reception.... The girl
showing him something about her neck--that accursed lo