heart.... And it was a bad business.

"You will let me do the telling," he stated at last, grimly. "What
can be said, I'll say. Like a fool, I will meddle."

And so it happened that within another hour two very stiff and
constrained young men were ringing the bell at the entrance door of
Tewfick Pasha.




CHAPTER VIII

TEWFICK RECEIVES


A huge Soudanese admitted them. They found themselves in a tiled
vestibule, looking through open arches into the green of a
garden--that garden, Ryder hardly needed to remind himself, with
whose back door he had made such unconventional acquaintance.

Now he had a glimpse of a sunny fountain and fluttering pigeons,
and, on either side of the garden, of the two wings of the building,
gay white walls with green shutters more suggestive of a French
villa than an Egyptian palace, before the Soudanese marshaled them
toward the stairs upon the right.

The left, then, was the way to the haremlik. And somewhere in those
secluded rooms, to which no man but the owner of the palace ever