"Your business?" asked the Mudir.

"The business of the Khedive," answered Dicky, and his riding-whip tapped
his leggings. "I have come about the English girl." As he said this, he
lighted a cigarette slowly, looking, as it were casually, into the
Mudir's eyes.

The Mudir's hand ran out like a snake towards a bell on the cushions, but
Dicky shot forward and caught the wrist in his slim, steel-like fingers.
There was a hard glitter in his eyes as he looked down into the eyes of
the master of a hundred slaves, the ruler of a province.

"I have a command of the Khedive to bring you to Cairo, and to kill you
if you resist," said Dicky. "Sit still--you had better sit still," he
added, in a soothing voice behind which was a deadly authority.

The Mudir licked his dry, colourless lips, and gasped, for he might make
an outcry, but he saw that Dicky would be quicker. He had been too long
enervated by indulgence to make a fight.

"You'd better take a drink of water," said Dicky, seating himself upon a
Louis Quinze chair, a relic of civilisation brought by the Mudir from
Paris into an antique barbarism. Then he added sternly: "What have you
done with the English girl?"

"I know nothing of an English girl," answered the Mudir.

Dicky's words were chosen as a jeweller chooses stones for the ring of a
betrothed woman. "You had a friend in London, a brother of hell like