it
in a more brainy way."

Starnworth talked on and on. The time of the third prayer was at hand
when at last he said good-night. Turning at the door, just as he was
going out, he looked at Isaacson with his light and imaginative eyes.

"A different code from ours, you see!" he murmured.

He went out and gently shut the door.

Although it was so late and Isaacson had that day arrived from a
journey, he felt strongly alive, and as if no power to sleep were in
him. Of course, he must go to bed, nevertheless. Slowly he began to
undress, slowly and reluctantly.

And he was in Cairo, actually in Cairo! All around him in the night was
Cairo, with its houses full of Egyptians sleeping, with its harims, with
its mosques! Not far away was the Sphinx looking east in the sand!

He pottered about his room. He did things very slowly. Eastern life, as
it had flowed from the lips of Starnworth, went before his imagination
like a great and strange procession. And in this procession Mahmoud
Baroudi drove Russian horses, and walked, almost like a mendicant, in a
discoloured gibbeh. And then the procession stopped, and Isaacson saw
the dingy cafe in the entrails of Cairo, and Mahmoud Baroudi crouched
upon the floor drawing the smoke of the hashish into his nostrils.

At last Isaacson was in pajamas and ready for bed. But still his mind
was terribly wide awake. The papers he had bought in the afternoon were
lying upon his table. Should he read a little to compose his mind? He
took up a paper--the _Morning Post_--opened it, and glanced casually
over the middle page.

"Sudden death of the Earl of Harwich."

So Nigel's brother was gone, and, but for the twin boys so recently
arrived, Mrs. Armine would at this moment be Countess of Harwich!

Isaacson read the paragraph quickly; then he put the paper down and
opened his window. He wanted to think in the air. As he leaned out to
the silent city, faintly, as if from very far off, he heard a cry that
thrilled through his blood and set his pulses beating.

From a minaret a mueddin was calling the faithful to prayer, at "fegr,"
when the sun pushes the first ray of steel-coloured light, like the
blade of a distant lance, into the breast of the East.

"Al-la-hu-akbar! Al-la-hu-ak-bar!"

XXX

Isaacson had come out to Egypt with no settled plan. The only thing he
knew was that he meant to see Nigel Armine. He had not cabled or written
to let Nigel know he was coming, and now th