tennis mad. He looks hurt
if you ask him to do anything else except perhaps to trail fatuously
after you. It's the flat-woods for mine."

Ann returned from her visit to the Indian camp scintillant with italics
and enthusiasm.

"My dear," she said, "I'm _wild_ about her--_quite_ wild! . . . I'm
going again and _again_! . . . If I knew _half_ as much and were
_half_ as lovely-- Why, do you know, Diane, she set me right about
some ridiculous quotation, and I never try to get them straight, for
_half_ the time I find my own way so _much_ more expressive. . . .
There's Philip Poynter with a tennis racquet again! Diane, I'm losing
patience with him."

From her madcap craving for new sensation, Ann was destined to evolve
an inspiration which with customary energy and Diane's interested
connivance she swept through to fruition, unaware that Fate marched,
leering, at her heels.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE BLACK PALMER

Curious things may happen when masked men hold revel under a moonlit
sky.

Thus in a tropical garden of palm and fountain, of dark, shifting
shadows and a thousand softly luminous Chinese lanterns swaying in a
breeze of spice, a Bedouin talked to an ancient Greek.

"He is here?" asked the Bedouin with an accent slightly foreign.

"Yes," said the Greek. "He is here and immensely relieved, I take it,
to be rid of the jurisdiction of the hay-camp."

"I fancied he would not dare--"

"A man in love," commented the Greek dryly, "dares much for the sake of
his lady. One may conceivably lack discretion without forfeiting his
claim to courage."

"The disguise of his stained and shaven face," hinted the Bedouin
grimly, "has made him over-confident. Having tested it with apparent
success upon you--"

"Even so. But he has forgotten that few men have such striking eyes."

"If he has taken the pains to assure himself of my whereabouts,"
rumbled the Bedouin, "as he surely has, I am of course still blistering
in extreme southern Florida, hunting tarpon. I have a permanent
Washington address which I have taken pains to notify of my interest in
tarpon and to which he writes. These incognito days," added the
Bedouin with a slight smile, "my cipher communications cross an ocean
and return immediately by trusted hands to America, though I, of
course, know nothing of it. Those from my charming minstrel to
me--make similar tours."

"And I?"

"You--my secretary--having spent a few days with the Sherrills