nown Colossi."

He did not frown this time as he folded the paper and turned to watch
the commissionaire in conclave with a coal-black Ethiopian who, clad in
crimson tunic, enormous turban and with scimitar rattling at his side,
tendered an envelope.

"Yes, yes," said the hotel servant. "I will see that it is delivered
into the gentleman's own hands. And, tell me"--he lowered his voice as
he winked his eye--"has she returned from Alexandria?"

Qatim was caught in a quandary, and he cursed the vanity which had
urged him to don his most resplendent garments upon his errand to the
great hotel, to which he had come after a violent argument with
Zulannah.

With a heart full of hatred, and agony in her twisted limbs the woman
had hung about the streets in front of the hotel until she had seen the
man for whom she had felt such a sudden and fleeting love, and who was
the primary cause of her disfigurement.

Hurt him she must, if only as a balm to her own physical and mental
agony; and in what better way than by destroying his faith in the white
girl he loved?

Hence the letter, written hastily in the hovel and consigned to the
care of the Ethiopian, who, in return for his assistance, had demanded
backshisch in the shape of a pink leaf covered with strange black marks.

The woman's presence in the great city in her deplorable state was the
last thing he wanted to be known; so he lied--clumsily.

"Nay; she is in Alexandria," he blurted out.

The commissionaire slowly winked an eye.

"Perhaps," he said; "perhaps not," and chuckled as the negro turned
hastily and strode away in the direction of the bank.

And thus came it to be known in the bazaar that Zulannah the courtesan
had returned to the great city.

And a little later, Ben Kelham felt no tweak at the string with which
Fate had hobbled him to his destiny, when, on hearing his number
called, he took the letter from the page-boy, turned it over, and
looked at it on each side, as we do when curious, but not
over-interested; then he opened it idly, read it and crushed it in both
hands.

It was written in the execrable English Zulannah had picked up in her
few years of cosmopolitan intercourse with different nationalities; it
was in vile hand-writing and was as despicable a method of revenge as
an anonymous letter usually is.

It ran after this fashion:

"If you want to find your white woman go and look for her in the ruins
of Karnak, at night, in the arms