or she
suddenly placed one hand upon her left side, and tottered. Abdallah Jack
supported her. She screamed aloud.

"Madam!" she said. "It is the vertigo. I am overtook!"

She was really ill; her face, indeed, became the colour of a plover's
egg.

"Let me go to bed, madam," she implored. "It is the vertigo, madam. I
am overtook!"

Under ordinary circumstances Mrs. Greyne would have prescribed a dose of
Kasbah air, but to-night she felt strange, and she wanted strangeness.
Mrs. Forbes with the vertigo, in a small carriage, would be
inappropriate. She, therefore, bade her retire, mounted into the vehicle
with Abdallah Jack, and was quickly driven away, her bonnet strings
floating upon the winsome wind.

"You know my husband?" she asked softly of the guide.

Abdallah Jack replied in French that he rather thought he did.

"How is he looking?" continued Mrs. Greyne in a slightly yearning voice.
"My Eustace!" she added to herself, "my devoted one!"

"Monsieur Greyne is pale as washed linen upon the Kasbah wall," replied
Abdallah Jack, lighting a cigarette, and wreathing the great novelist in
its grey-blue smoke. "He is thin as the Spahi's lance, he is nervous as
the leaves of the eucalyptus-tree when the winds blow from the north."

Mrs. Greyne was seriously perturbed.

"Would I had come before!" she murmured, with serious self-reproach.

"Monsieur Greyne is worse than all the English," pursued Abdallah Jack
in a voice that sounded to Mrs. Greyne decidedly sinister. "He is worse
than the tourists of Rook, who laugh in the doorways of the mosques and
twine in their hair the dried lizards of the Sahara. Even the guide
of Rook rejected him. I only would undertake him because I am full of
evil."

Mrs. Greyne began to feel distinctly uncomfortable, and to wish she
had not been so ready to pander to Mrs. Forbes' vertigo. She stole a
sidelong glance at her strange companion. The carriage was small. The
end of his bristling black moustache was very near. What he said of
Mr. Greyne did not disturb her, because she knew that her Eustace had
sacrificed his reputation to do her service; but what he said about
himself was not reassuring.

"I think you must be doing yourself an injustice," she said in a rather
agitated voice.

"Madame?"

"I do not believe you are so bad as you imply," she continued.

The carriage turned with a jerk out of the brilliantly-lighted
thoroughfare that runs along the sea into a narrow side s