ot a
single winning card.

"Let not Madame cause herself worry," answered the oriental also in
French, as he approached nearer still, his eyes ablaze with passion of
sorts as be looked the girl up and down from head to foot. "The
police--the law--you are in Egypt, Madame, or I should say Mademoiselle
I think. Money! when a man holds heaven itself within his grasp, does
he open his hand to grasp a passing cloud?"

"I should advise you to let me go _at_ once," repeated Jill, "if you
don't want my friends to raise trouble!"

But her bluff was of no avail as she was soon aware when once more the
man salaamed with a world of mockery in the action.

"But Mademoiselle has but now run away from her friends! No?--she has
but little--oh! _very_ little money!--yes?--and nowhere to go--it is
for that that I have thrown my protection around her!"

Jill thought hard for a moment, wondering how much the man knew of her
escapade.

"How do you know? _Who_ told you I had no money? I _have_ a friend as
it happens------!"

"Mademoiselle has no friend but me," interrupted the man; "she left
them at the hotel when she went to take a walk."

And Jill retreated step by step before him as he came closer still, his
voice sinking to a whisper, his hand within an inch of her wrist.

"I will not harm you because you are oh, _very_ beautiful! You are a
feast of loveliness and I--I am hungry!"

But still the little smile twisted the corner of Jill's red mouth as
she looked unflinchingly into the brown eyes in the depths of which
smouldered a something which was not good to look upon.

"I suppose you have stolen my dressing-case too," was her next,
somewhat irrelevant remark. "Men of _your_ type I dare say can find a
use for everything from women to hair-pins. You black _dog_, who _are_
you?"

Red murder flared in the room for one moment and then died down,
leaving a little smoke cloud of uncertainty in the man's mind.

He was used--oh, _very_ used to the breaking in of women, for was not
his name notorious in Northern Egypt and were there not whispers of
many young and beautiful who had mysteriously disappeared.

Were not men and women in his pay in every corner of the big cities
posing as honest individuals? And was he not in direct communication
with them? And had he not a coterie of jackal friends who hunted with
him, though of a truth not half so successfully or artistically as he?

And yet this slip of a girl, this p