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Page 2
"Oh! Am I so terribly late?" said the girl with great pleasantness,
and arched brows of surprise at the two other places at the table
before which used tea things were standing.
"My sister and Lady Claire had an appointment, so they were obliged
to have their tea and leave," stated the young man, with an air of
politely endeavoring to conceal his feelings, and failing
conspicuously in the endeavor. "They were most sorry."
"Oh, so am I!" declared the girl, in clear and contrite tones which
carried perfectly to Billy B. Hill's enchanted ears. "I never
dreamed they would have to hurry away."
"They did not hurry, as you call it," and the young man glanced at
his watch, "for nearly an hour. It was a disappointment to them."
"Pin-pate!" thought Billy, with intense disgust. "Is he kicking at a
two-some?"
"And have you had your tea, too?" inquired the girl, with an air of
tantalizing unconcern.
"I waited, naturally, for my guest."
"Oh, not _naturally_!" she laughed. "It must be very unnatural for
you to wait for anything. And you must be starving. So am I--do you
think there are enough cakes left for the two of us?"
Without directly replying, the young man gave the order to the
red-fezzed Arab in a red-girdled white robe who was removing the
soiled tea things, and he assisted the girl into a chair and sat
down facing her. Their profiles were given to the shameless Billy,
and he continued his rapt observations.
He had immediately recognized the girl as a vision he had seen
fluttering around the hotel with an incongruously dismal
couple of unyouthful ladies, and he had mentally affixed a
magnate's-only-daughter-globe-trotting-with-elderly-friends label to
her.
The young man he could not place so definitely. There were a good
many tall, aristocratic young Englishmen about, with slight stoops
and incipient moustaches. This particular Englishman had hair that
was pronouncedly sandy, and Billy suddenly recollected that in
lunching at the Savoy the other day he had noticed that young
Englishman in company with a sandy-haired lady, not so young, and a
decidedly pretty dark-haired girl--it was the girl, of course, who
had fixed the group in Billy's crowded impressions. He decided that
these ladies were the sister and Lady Claire--and Lady Claire, he
judiciously concluded, certainly had nothing on young America.
Young America was speaking. "Don't look so thunderous!" she
complained to her irate host. "How do you know I didn't plan to be
late so as to have you all to myself?"
This was too derisive for endurance. A dull red burned through the
tan on the young Englishman's cheeks and crept up to meet the
corresponding warmth of his hair. A leash within him snapped.
"It is simply inconceivable!" burst from him, and then he shut his
jaw hard, as if only one last remnant of will power kept a seething
volcano, from explosion.
"What is?"
"How any girl--in Cairo, of all places!" he continued to explode in
little snorts.
"You are speaking of--?" she suggested.
"Of your walking with that fellow--in broad daylight!"
"Would it have been better in the gloaming?"
The sweet restraint in the young thing's manner was supernatural. It
was uncanny. It should have warned the red-headed young man, but
oblivious of danger signals, he was plunging on, full steam ahead.
"It isn't as if you didn't know--hadn't been warned."
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