-hour."

"Madame is going out? But madame is ill, tired!"

"It matters not."

"Where does madame wish to go?"

"I am going to the Kasbah to find my husband."

"I will escort madame."

The proprietor, the _maitre d'hotel_, the waiters, the porters, the
chasseurs, Mrs. Greyne and Mrs. Forbes, all turned about to face the
determined speaker.

And there before them, his dark eyes gleaming, his long moustaches
bristling fiercely--here stood Abdallah Jack.

VII

Man is a self-deceiver. It must, therefore, ever be a doubtful point
whether Mr. Eustace Greyne, during his residence in Africa, absolutely
lost sight of his sense of duty; whether, beguiled by the lively
attentions of a fiercely foreign town, he deliberately resolved to
take his pleasure regardless of consequences and of the sacred ties of
Belgrave Square. We prefer to think that some vague idea of combining
two duties--that which he owed to himself and that which he owed to Mrs.
Greyne--moved him in all he did, and that the subterfuge into which
he was undoubtedly led was not wholly selfish, not wholly criminal.
Nevertheless, that he had lied to his beloved wife is certain. Even
while she sat over a cutlet and a glass of claret in the white-and-gold
dining-room of the Grand Hotel, preparatory to her departure to the
Kasbah with Abdallah Jack, the dozen of Merrin's exercise-books lay
upstairs in Mr. Greyne's apartments filled to the brim with African
frailty. Already there was material enough in their pages to furnish
forth a library of "Catherines." Yet Mr. Greyne still lingered far from
his home, and wired to that home fabricated accounts of the singular
innocence of Algiers. He even allowed it to be supposed that his
own innocence stood in the way of his fulfilment of Mrs. Greyne's
behests--he who could now have given points in knowledge of the world to
whole regiments of militiamen!

It was not right, and, doubtless, he must stand condemned by every
moralist. But let it not be forgotten that he had fallen under the
influence of a Levantine.

Mademoiselle Verbena's mother, hidden in some unnamed hospital of
Algiers, appeared to be one of those ingenious elderly ladies who can
hover indefinitely upon the brink of death without actually dying.
During the whole time that Mr. Greyne had been in Africa her state had
been desperate, yet she still clung to life. As her daughter said, she
possessed extraordinary vitality, and this vitality seemed to h