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Page 69
"Have you been out to the Gezireh Palace?" she very innocently
inquired.
"Alone," said Billy.
"It's very jolly there," said she. "It's so gay--and the music is
_quite_ good."
"H'm," meditated Billy. "The condemned man ate a hearty tea of
Orange Pekoe and cress sandwiches," he reflected silently. He also
reflected that Miss Falconer would be furious--and that invited
him--and that time was interminable and that this expedition was as
good a way of getting through the afternoon as any other. Thereupon
he turned to the English girl, with a humorous challenge in his
gaze. "I wonder if you and Miss Falconer would let this be my tea
party?" he suggested.
"Miss Falconer will be delighted," said Lady Claire mendaciously.
The traces of that delight, however, lay beneath so well schooled an
exterior that they were decidedly non-apparent. Nor did Robert
Falconer's mien reveal any hint of joy when he returned to the hotel
and found the two ladies starting with Billy. He joined them with
rather the air of a watch dog, but that air soon wore away during
the long drive under the spell of young Hill's frank friendliness
and gay good humor. For Billy was extravagantly in spirits.
Excitement stirred in him like wine; his blood was on fire with
thoughts of the evening.
"It's the fool _lark_ of the thing," he said, half apologetically,
to Falconer's wonder when the two young men were alone for a minute
on the Gezireh verandas. "Didn't you ever want to be a pirate?"
The red-headed young man nodded. "Yes, but this business doesn't
make me feel like a pirate--more like a second-story man!"
"I've left letters with Fritzi Baroff," said Hill, "and if we're not
back by morning, she's to go to the authorities with them."
"That won't do us any good," said the Englishman grimly.
But after the ladies returned it was a very merry-seeming tea party.
Even Miss Falconer unbent to the artist, as she persisted in calling
Billy, though he had dutifully enlightened her that engineering was
his true and proper life work, and art but a random diversion, and
she promised to show him the sketches which she had been making,
and piled him with questions about his mysterious America.
And Lady Claire was very prettily animated, and rallied Falconer
upon his absent-mindedness and told Billy tales of her English home
and how her father had threatened to change the name of the Hall to
_M�dchenheim_ because there were five daughters of them. "_Five_
girls near an age, Mr. Hill, and all poor as church mice!" she had
blithely asserted.
But from what Billy heard of balls and hunters and "seasons," he
gleaned that being poor as church mice, for these five titled girls,
meant merely an effort in keeping up with the things they felt
should be theirs by right divine. And as Billy listened, feeling the
force of the girl's attraction, the charm of her serene confidence
and the pleasant air of security and well-being that hedged her in,
he stole a covert glance at Falconer's unrevealing countenance and
reflected that it was rather a stormy day for that young man when he
became entangled with the fortunes of little Miss Beecher. It was
also a stormy day for himself, but he felt that storms belonged more
naturally to his adventurous lot.
* * * * *
But it was characteristic of Falconer when once committed to a plan
not to open his mind to the objections which besieged it. So that
night, at the fall of dark, as the two young men motored forth
together, he maintained a stolid resolution which refused to look
back. The approach of the danger was tuning up his nerves, and
whatever his common sense might think about it, his youth and pluck
greeted the adventure with a quickening heart and a rash warmth of
blood.
Both young men were resolute and confident. Either would have been
more than human if he had not looked a trifle askance upon the other
and wished to thunder that he had been able to go into it alone and
to have tasted the intoxication of delivering the girl single-handed
out of the den of thieves. But the success of the plan was
paramount, as Billy reminded himself.
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