After some two years out in Gambia, George Barclay returned to England. He returned with a scar across his right cheek.
That scar was the first thing his little daughter remarked upon when the excitement of reunion had died down.
Perched on his knee, she touched it with gentle little fingers and kissed it with soft lips.
"Who has hurt my nice new Daddy?" she asked distressfully.
Then there followed the story of the youthful Sultan Casim Ammeh.
"Oh, what a wicked boy!" she exclaimed.
Then she glanced across at her godfather who was sitting near.
"Isn't he a bad, naughty boy, Grand-godfather, to want to kill my Daddy and sell me as a slave?"
Henry Langham had listened to the story with interest, and very heartily he agreed with her.
"I shall tell Bobby," the little girl went on indignantly, "and he'll go and kill the Sultan Casim Ammeh."
"Who's Bobby?" her father asked.
"My sweetheart. Master Robert Cameron."
"So in my absence I've been cut out, have I?" her father said teasingly. "I'm dreadfully jealous."
But Pansy snuggled closer to him, and her arms went round his neck in a tight hug.
"There'll never be anyone as nice as my Daddy," she whispered.
George Barclay held the tiny girl closer, kissing the golden head.
Often during his months in England, Pansy would scramble on his knee and say:
"Daddy, tell me the story of Casim Ammeh. That naughty boy who hurt your poor face."
To Pansy it was some new Arabian Nights, vastly interesting because her father was one of the principal characters. Although she had heard it quite fifty times, she was ready to hear it quite fifty times more.
"But, my darling, you've heard it scores of times," Barclay said one day.
For all that he told the story again.
Quietly she listened until the end was reached. Then she said:
"I don't like him. Not one little bit. Do you like him, Daddy?"
"To tell you the truth, Pansy, I did like him. He was a very brave boy."
"I shall never like him, because he hurt you," she said firmly, her little flower-like face set and determined.
"Well, my girlie, you're never likely to meet him, so it won't make much difference to him whether you like him or not."
But—in the Book of Fate it was written otherwise.
Somewhere off the Boulevard St. Michel there is a cabaret. The big dancing hall has red walls painted with yellow shooting stars, and, overhead, electric lights blaze under red and yellow shades. There is a bar at one end, and several little tables for the patrons' use when they tire of dancing. In the evenings a band, in seedy, red uniforms with brass buttons, fills, with a crash of sound, an atmosphere ladened with patchouli and cigarette smoke, and waiters, in still more seedy dress-suits, attend to the tables. Never at any time is the gathering select, and generally there are quite a few foreigners of all colours present.
One night, the most noticeable among the patrons was an Englishman, well-groomed and tailored, and a big youth of about eighteen in a flowing white burnoose.
They were in no way connected with each other, but chance, in the shape of their female companions, had brought them to adjacent tables.
The girl with the youngster was very pretty in a hard, metallic way, with the white face and vivid red lips of the Parisienne, and brown eyes, bright and polished-looking, that were about as expressionless as pebbles. She was attired in a cheap, black evening dress, cut very low, and about her plump throat was a coral necklace. Her hair was elaborately dressed, and her shoes, although well worn, were tidy.
By day, Marie Hamon earned a meagre living for herself in a florist's shop. At night, she added to her earnings in the recognized way of quite a few of the working girls of Paris. And this particular cabaret was one of her hunting grounds.
As Marie sat there "making eyes" at the youth in the white burnoose, the man at the next table remarked in French, in an audible and disgusted tone:
"Look at that girl there making up to that young nigger. A beastly spectacle, I call it."
Before his companion had time to reply the youth was up, his black eyes flashing, and he grasped the Englishman's shoulder in an angry, indignant fashion.
"I am no nigger!" he cried. "I'm the Sultan Casim Ammeh."
"I don't care a damn who you are so long as you keep your black paws off me!"
The youth's hands were not black, but deeply bronzed like his face, which looked darker than it really was against the whiteness of his hood.
"Take back that word," he said savagely, "or, by Allah, it shall be wiped out in blood!"
He drew his knife. The girls screamed. Excited waiters rushed towards the table. The mixed company stopped dancing and pressed forward to watch what looked like the beginning of a royal row. Such incidents were by no means unusual in the cabaret.
Only the Englishman remained calm. He grasped his opponent's wrist quickly.
"No, you don't," he said. "You damned niggers seem to think you own the world nowadays."
There was a brief scuffle. But the Englishman was big and heavy, and half a dozen waiters were hanging on to the enraged and insulted youth. His knife was wrested from his hand. He was hustled this way and that; and, finally, worsted and smouldering, he retired, to be led to another and more distant table by his female companion.
The episode was over in a couple of minutes. Disappointed at the lack of bloodshed, the spectators returned to their dancing. Relieved, the waiters went back to their various spheres. The Englishman seated himself again as if nothing had happened. At a distant table the youth sat and glowered at him.
"Who is that man?" he asked presently, pointing a lean forefinger at his late opponent.
Marie shrugged her plump shoulders.
"I've never seen him here before. He looks to me like an Englishman."
With renewed interest the youth studied the distant figure, hate smouldering in his black eyes.
So he was one of the nation who had murdered his father! This man who had insulted him.
But, for all his hatred of the Englishman, reluctantly he admired his coolness and his clothes.
The world had enlarged for Annette Le Breton's son since his first experience with the English.
On escaping from Barclay, with the remaining handful of the defunct Sultan's following, he had returned to El-Ammeh, at the age of fourteen its recognised ruler.
The boy was not lacking in sense. Defeat at the hands of both British and French made him decide to give up what had been the late Sultan's chief source of income—marauding. With a wisdom beyond his years, Casim Ammeh, as he was now always called, decided to go in for trading; and before many years had passed he saw it was a better paying game than marauding, despite its lack of excitement.
Then he extended his operations.
There were always caravans coming to his desert city, and a great demand for articles that came from the Europe his mother had told him of.
With one or two of his principal merchants he went down to St. Louis, but he did not go as the Sultan Casim Ammeh; that name was too well known to the French Government. Instead, he went under the name his mother used to call him, Raoul Le Breton. And under that name he opened a store in St. Louis.
There was a new generation in the town since his real father's day, and the name roused no comment. It was an ordinary French one. In St. Louis there were quite a few half-breed French-Arabs, as the youth supposed himself to be, living and trading under European names.
His business ventures were so successful that he opened several more stores at various points between St. Louis and his own capital; but the whereabouts of his own city he did not divulge to strangers.
At sixteen it had seemed to the boy that St. Louis was the hub of the universe; but at eighteen a craving that amounted to nostalgia drove him further afield—to Paris.
And he went in Arabian garments, for he was intensely proud of his sultanship and the desert kingdom he ruled with undisputed sway.
To his surprise, he felt wonderfully at home in his mother's city. It did not feel as strange as St. Louis had felt, but more as if he had once lived there and had forgotten about it.
He had been a couple of days in Paris, wandering at will, when on the second evening his wanderings had brought him in contact with Marie Hamon. She was by no means the first of her sort to accost him, but she was the first he had condescended to take any notice of. She had smiled at him as, aloof and haughty, he had stalked along the Boulevard St. Michel, and had fallen into step beside him. He had looked at her in a peculiar manner that was half amusement, half contempt, but he had not shaken her off.
She had suggested they should have dinner together, and he had fallen in with her suggestion; not exactly with alacrity, but as if he wanted to study the girl further. For all her plump prettiness and profession, there was a shrewd, sensible air about her. Afterwards, at her instigation, they had repaired to the cabaret.
As the youth continued to scowl at the distant Englishman, with the idea of preventing further trouble, Marie tried to get his mind on other matters.
"Casim, let's have a dance?" she suggested.
"I can afford to pay for hired dancers, so why should I posture for the benefit of others?" he asked scornfully.
She tittered.
"Well, get me another drink instead, then."
He beckoned a waiter and gave a curt order. However, he did not touch the cheap champagne himself. Instead, he kept strictly to coffee.
"Have a drop of cognac in it to cheer you up a bit," Marie said. "You make me feel as if I were at a funeral."
"I'm a Mohammedan, and strong drink is forbidden."
"You are the limit! I shouldn't quarrel with the good things of this life even if I were a Mohammedan."
"By my religion women have no souls," he replied in a voice that spoke volumes.
But Marie was not easily abashed.
"The lack of a soul doesn't trouble me in the least," she responded lightly. "A pretty body is of greater use to a woman any day. Do you think I'm pretty, Casim?" she finished coquettishly.
"I shouldn't be with you unless you were," he replied, as if her question were an insult to his taste.
For some minutes there was silence. As the girl sipped her champagne she watched her escort in a calculating manner.
"You've got lots of money, haven't you?" she said presently.
"Not as much as I intend to have," he replied.
"But enough to buy me a new frock?" she questioned.
"Fifty, if you want them."
Marie threw her arms around his neck.
"You nice boy!" she cried, kissing him soundly.
He resented her attentions, removing her arms in a none too gentle manner.
"I object to such displays of affection in public," he said, with an air of ruffled dignity.
"Come home with me, then," she suggested.
"Home" to Marie was an attic in a poor street. There Casim Ammeh went, not as a victim to her charms, as she imagined, but seeing in her a means to his own end.
The next morning as he sat at breakfast with the girl—a meagre repast of black coffee and rolls—from somewhere out of his voluminous robes he produced a string of pearls and dangled it before his hostess. Marie looked at them, her mouth round with surprise, for they were real and worth at least ten thousand francs.
"If I give you these, Marie, will you teach me to become a Frenchman?" he asked.
"Won't I just!" she cried enthusiastically, and without hesitation continued: "First of all we must get an apartment. And,mon Dieu!yes, you must cut your hair short."
The youth wore his hair long, knotted under his hood in the Arab fashion.
It was three months before Casim Ammeh left Paris. And he left it in a correctly cut English suit and with his smooth, black hair brushed back over his head. In the spick-and-span young man it would have been difficult to recognise the barbaric youth who had come there knowing nothing of civilised life except what his mother had told him and what he had seen in St. Louis; and, what was more, he felt at ease in his new garments, in spite of having worn burnoose and hood all his life.
The day before he left, Marie sat with him in thesalonof the pretty flat they had occupied since the day they struck their bargain. And she looked very different, too.
Her evening frock was no longer of shabby black. It was one of the several elaborate gowns she now possessed, thanks to the young man. And she no longer wore a string of coral beads about her pretty throat, but the pearl necklace.
Although Marie had taken on the youth as a business speculation, within a few days she loved him passionately. She was loath to let her benefactor go, but all her wiles failed to keep him.
"When you're back in Africa you won't quite forget your little Marie who taught you to be a man, will you?" she whispered tearfully.
Her remarks made him laugh.
"I've had women of my own for at least a year before I met you," he replied.
It seemed to Marie she had never really known the youth who had come to her a savage and was leaving her looking a finished man of the world. He never talked to her of himself or his affairs. Although kind and generous, he demanded swift obedience, and he treated her always as something infinitely inferior to himself.
"Say you love me," she pleaded. "That you'll think of me sometimes."
"Love!" he said contemptuously. "I don't love women. I have them for my pleasure. I'm not one of your white men who spend their days whining at some one woman's feet pleading for favours. Women to me are only toys. Good to look upon, if beautiful, but not so good as horses."
"Oh, you are cruel!" she said, weeping. "And I thought you loved me."
"It is the woman's place to love. There are other things in a man's life."
Marie realised she had never had any hold on her protégé. She had been of use to him, and he had paid her well for it, and there, as far as he was concerned, the matter ended.
Being sensible, she sat up and dried her tears, gathering consolation from the fact that he had been a good speculation. There would be no immediate need to return to the florist's shop when he had gone. In fact, if she liked to sell the necklace, she could buy a business of her own.
"Shall you come to Paris again, Casim?" she asked.
"Oh yes, often. It's a good city, full of beautiful women who are easy to buy."
But he made a reservation to himself.
When he came again he would come under the name his mother used to call him—Raoul Le Breton, and he would come in European clothes. Then the English he hated would not be able to hurl that detestable word "nigger" at him.
In a select French boarding-school a girl sat reading a letter. She was about fifteen years old, a slender, lovely child, light and graceful, with a cascade of golden curls reaching to her waist, and wide, purple eyes. Her complexion was perfect. She had a vivid little red mouth, impulsive and generous, and a pink rose on each cheek.
On reading the letter, sorrow clouded her face. For it ran:—
"My Dear Little Pansy,
When you get this letter I shall be with your mother. I am leaving you the money she would not have. And it was worth having, you will agree, for it will bring you in about £60,000 a year. The only condition I make is that you take the name your mother refused, your own second name. And my one hope is that you will be more successful in love than I was.
Your affectionate 'grand-godfather,'Henry Langham."
For some minutes Pansy sat brooding on her godfather's end. The poor old boy had been awfully ill for a long time, and now he was dead.
She blinked back a couple of tears. Then her thoughts went to the fortune she had inherited.
Presently she crossed to the mirror and looked at herself.
"No, old girl," she said to her reflection, "your head isn't turned."
Then she slipped the letter into her pocket and made straight for her great friend and confidante.
To the average eye there was nothing about Miss Grainger to attract a vivid, beautiful girl like Pansy Barclay—Pansy Langham as she would be now. Miss Grainger was middle-aged, grey-haired, thin and depressed-looking: the down-trodden English mistress, with no qualifications except good breeding.
She was poor and friendless, and life had gone hard with her, but these facts were sufficient to fill Pansy's heart with a warmth of generous affection and sympathy.
The girl's principal thought as she went along was not so much of the millions she had just inherited, but that she had always wanted to do something for Miss Grainger, and now she saw a way of doing it.
She entered the room that served the English mistress as bedroom, study and sitting-room, disturbing the latter in the midst of correcting an accumulated pile of exercise books.
"What is it, Pansy?" she asked, smiling at her favourite.
"Miss Grainger, you'll be pleased to hear I'm a millionaire."
The English mistress put down her pen carefully, and then sat staring at the child.
"Really, my dear," she said in a bewildered tone, "you have a way of saying the most surprising things in the most matter-of-fact manner. But, since you're saying it, it must be true."
"That's a character in itself," Pansy remarked, smiling, a smile that brought to view several bewitching dimples.
She produced the letter and handed it to her friend.
The English mistress read it through.
"Sixty thousand pounds a year!" she exclaimed. "It makes my head reel."
"Then yours can't be so firmly screwed on as mine. Mine isn't turned one little bit. I looked at myself in a glass to see."
"But what are you going to do with it all?" the governess asked helplessly.
"Spend it, of course. I take after my father and never shirk an unpleasant duty," she went on, a mischievous glint in her eyes. "To begin with, you, Miss Grainger, are going to be my companion, and we'll have a yacht and go all round the world together, and see and do everything that can be seen and done."
"You'll get married, Pansy," the governess said, looking lovingly at the beautiful flower-like, little face.
"Not much! You dear old antiquated thing. I'm not going to be tied by the leg in that fashion."
"As the English mistress, I must remind you that 'tied by the leg' is slang."
"When you're my companion you'll be talking slang yourself. I'm not so sure I won't make that one of the stipulations," the child went on teasingly. "It'll be such a change for you after thirty years of correcting stupid exercises."
"It will be rather," Miss Grainger said wistfully.
"And I shall come out at seventeen," Pansy went on. "I must start as early as possible if I'm to spend all that money. I shall write and ask my father if I may come out at seventeen. Do you think he'll refuse?"
"No man will ever refuse you anything, Pansy. You're too sweet and good and beautiful."
"And rich. Don't forget the rich. That'll be a tremendous draw."
Miss Grainger smiled at her favourite.
"I hope the man who marries you will pick you for your good heart and generous nature, not your looks and money," she remarked.
"Still harping on that old string, Mrs. Noah. Women don't get married nowadays if they can afford to stay single."
Then the school dinner-bell ringing sent Pansy from the room, but not before she had given an impetuous hug and kiss to her friend.
Paris always has a welcome for millionaires. And it always had a specially warm welcome for Raoul Le Breton, the African merchant-prince. Not only was he fabulously rich, but he was young and remarkably good-looking. It was whispered that he had Arab blood in his veins, but he was wealthy enough for the majority to overlook this drawback.
Like many modern Frenchmen, he dabbled in "le sport." He was a brilliant tennis player, a worthy opponent at billiards, and he kept a stud of race-horses. There was hardly an actress of any repute and with any pretence to youth and beauty who had not had his patronage at one time or the other. Match-making mothers with marriageable daughters laid snares about his feet. With surprising agility he avoided their traps. None of the daughters proved sufficiently tempting to turn him from the broad, smooth way of gay Parisian bachelorhood to the steep and jagged path of matrimony.
Raoul Le Breton was about twenty-five when he paid his sixth visit to Paris. He came now for about three months every year. And he always came in style, with a whole retinue of Arab servants—silent, discreet men who never gossiped about their master. It was whispered also that out in Africa he had a whole harem of his own; moreover, that he was some big chief or the other. In fact, many things were whispered about him, for, on the whole, Paris knew very little except that he was wealthy and wild.
His French acquaintances tried to learn more of his doings through the medium of his own private doctor, a stout Frenchman who accompanied the young millionaire to and fro. But Dr. Edouard refused to gossip about his friend and patron.
In spite of his success, the young Sultan of El-Ammeh had not forgotten George Barclay.
On getting more in touch with civilisation and its ways he had tried to find out the name of the man who was responsible for the death of his supposed father. It was not an easy task. George Barclay had left Gambia five years before Raoul Le Breton set about his investigations. There had been a succession of men since Barclay's time, and the shooting of a native malefactor was not a matter of great note in the annals of a Government.
However, eventually Le Breton managed to establish the identity of the man he looked upon as his father's murderer.
But to trace George Barclay in England proved an even more difficult task than tracing him in Africa.
The Englishman had not stopped long in his country. In search of forgetfulness, he had gone from one place to another, holding posts in various parts of the Empire.
The Sultan Casim Ammeh was twenty-five when he heard that Barclay was in the Malay Straits.
The news came to him in Paris just when he was setting out for an evening's amusement in company with Dr. Edouard. The letter was brought to him as he stood in dress-suit, opera hat in hand, in his own private sitting-room at the palatial hotel he always patronised when in Paris.
On perusing it he turned to his companion, and said, with an air of savage triumph:
"Well, Edouard, I've managed to trace my man at last."
The doctor knew who the man in question was, for he, Edouard, was the Sultan Casim's one confidant. Rather uneasily he glanced at his patron. He wished the young man would be content with money and the many joys and pleasures it could buy—for Casim Ammeh was no longer a strict Mohammedan—and would not be always hankering after vengeance, a vengeance that might embroil him with England and bring his wild and brilliant career to an abrupt close.
"Where is George Barclay?" Edouard asked uneasily.
"In the Straits Settlements."
The doctor experienced a feeling of intense pleasure on hearing Barclay was in so remote a spot.
"It'll be difficult for you to get hold of him there," he remarked, trying to keep out of his voice the relief he was feeling.
"He won't stay there for ever. I've waited eleven years for my vengeance. I can go on waiting a little longer, until Fate thinks well to place him in a more accessible position."
With a savage expression Le Breton turned to a desk. Sitting down, he wrote to his agents telling them to keep him informed of George Barclay's movements.
The harem in the palace of El-Ammeh led into a large hall with carved doors and tiny arabesque windows, fretted and scrolled, with no one spot big enough to squeeze more than a hand through.
Generally speaking, the women of the harem preferred the large hall, where they could gossip among themselves and with their attendant women, to the little rooms that were their own private quarters.
But there was one special apartment that they all in turn had striven after and, in turn, had failed to attain. No one in the harem had seen the room except old Sara, and she had plenty of tales to tell about its magnificence. It was a big gilded chamber, with a ceiling like the sky on a desert night, and great golden, jewelled lamps. There was a wonderful bathroom, a fretted gallery that gave a wide view of the desert, a walled garden full of roses, and, above all, a door that led into the Sultan's private suite. The room had had no occupant since the days of the Sultan's mother, the Lady Annette, the first wife and favourite of his father. And Sara had been her special slave and attendant.
It could be reached from the harem. At one point behind the silken curtains a narrow stairway led upwards, and ended in a scented, sandalwood door. But the door was always locked, and only the Sultan had the key. It was common harem gossip that in that room he would place the one among his slaves whom he deigned to make his first wife.
Although the law allowed him four, and as many slaves as he fancied, so far he had no legal wife. It was strange, considering he was nearly thirty. But, in many ways, he differed from all the previous Sultans. According to old Sara, it was because his mother belonged to quite another race, and had come from a land as remote from El-Ammeh as Paradise, where the women were all white, a land that the Sultan now visited yearly.
For that land he was starting to-morrow.
He had just been to the harem to say farewell to the half-dozen girls there, departing with promises of new jewels and novelties to please and amuse these toys of his on his return. And now he lingered with his newest slave and favourite, Rayma, the Arab girl he had bought but six weeks ago.
He had come to the harem to say farewell.....He had come to the harem to say farewell.....
He had come to the harem to say farewell.....He had come to the harem to say farewell.....
Envious glances were cast towards the door behind which the Sultan Casim Ammeh and his new slave, Rayma, took farewell of one another.
One girl more than the others watched the door with hurt, angry, jealous eyes.
She was about twenty-three, with a full figure, a creamy skin, a profusion of long black curls, and great soft, languid eyes—a half-breed Spanish-Moorish girl of the true odalesque type.
Her attire was scanty. A red silk slip draped her from shoulder to knee, held on by ribbon straps; and on her hands and wrists and neck a quantity of barbaric jewelery flashed.
"I pray to Allah that on his travels our Sultan will find some woman he loves better than Rayma," she said, spite and jealousy in her soft voice.
"No, I don't pray that, Leonora," one of her companions remarked. "Foryoutook him fromme, and what am I now? Like you, a scent that has lost its savour; for it is but a shred of love that the Lord Casim has now for me. No; I pray mayheknow what it is to love and be denied, for too easily do women's hearts go to him. And no man values what comes to him cheaply. Our day is done, mine and yours, Leonora, as Rayma's will be when another woman takes his fancy. No, pray as I do, that he may love a woman who has no desire for him, who spurns his love—a woman whose people will not sell her, who is no slave put up for auction, as we were. May his heart ache, as mine has ached. May passion keep him sleepless, with empty arms and craving desire. May love prove to him a mirage that he can see yet never grasp!"
Unconscious of these wishes, the Sultan Casim Ammeh and the slave girl Rayma lingered together behind closed doors.
The moon shone into the little apartment, showing a big man in a white burnoose, and at his side a girl lay, looking at him with tearful, love-laden eyes.
She was about seventeen, with an amber skin and a cloud of straight black hair that reached to her heels. A cloud out from which looked a little oval face, with great black eyes and a small red mouth, a perfect type of Arab beauty.
"My Lord Casim, beloved, my heart breaks at the thought of your going," she said tearfully.
Smilingly he watched her, caressing her in an indulgent fashion.
"But, my desert flower, I shall come back again."
"But it is so far. And in that Paris there are so many women. I know, because Sara has told me. And all their arms will be stretched out to keep you there."
"No arms have kept me there for longer than three months," he replied.
"And mine! Mine are not strong enough to keep you here?" she sobbed.
He drew the sobbing little beauty into his embrace, and kissed her tear-stained face.
"Tell me, my jewel, what favour can I grant you before I go?"
"I want nothing but just to rest upon your heart for ever."
With a tender hand he stroked her long black hair, and tried to soothe away the tears; flattering tears, resulting from his coming departure.
"Don't go to Paris, Casim, beloved," she whispered. "Stay in El-Ammeh. Paris is so far, and I am so ignorant of all outside of the desert. Ignorant of everything except love and you. Think, my lord, only six weeks have we been together, and now you would go! Only six weeks since my father brought me from the desert to sell me to the Sultan Casim Ammeh. How afraid I was until I saw you. And then I was afraid I might not find favour in your sight. For my heart was yours the moment our eyes met. Only six weeks ago! Casim, don't go," she implored. "Stay with me, for my heart is breaking."
"Little one, there is business as well as love," he said gently.
"I think of nothing but love."
"Love is quite enough for any girl to think of."
"And those women in Paris, do they think only of love?"
"No; they think of money as well. That's why I prefer you."
She slipped her slim arms about his neck, pressing, her slight form against him, kissing him passionately.
"Let me live in the gilded chamber until you come back," she whispered, "and then I should feel the most honoured among your slaves."
However, he avoided this suggestion.
"We'll see about that when I return," he answered with an amused, indulgent air.
Then he held the girl closer.
"Now, before I go, Rayma, is there nothing you want? Nothing I can do for you?"
"There is one thing, my Sultan. Sell Leonora. I hate her. She's a great fat toad, always plotting and planning to steal your heart from me."
"I couldn't do that. I'm not quite like your desert men, remember. I can't sell a woman who has once pleased me. But, on my return, I'll find her a nice husband, if that will satisfy you."
There was a note in his voice that brooked no argument; and the girl, reared for the harem, was quick to notice it.
She gave a sharp glance at her owner. It seemed that a man she did not know stood behind her Sultan, indulgent master as he had proved. A man she had no hold over.
In one of the hotels in the Island of Grand Canary dinner had just been served. Around the door of the large dining-hall the manager, the head waiter and several underlings hovered, with an air of awaiting the arrival of some important personage.
Presently two people appeared in the doorway.
One was a middle-aged woman with grey hair and a prim expression. She was wearing a plain black silk evening dress, and she had the look of a retired governess. Her companion was of quite another type. She was a slender, graceful girl of medium height, with a mop of short, golden curls dancing round a small, frank face, that gave her the look of some lovely, delicate schoolboy. She wore a simple white silk frock, and her only mark of wealth was a large diamond hanging from a thin platinum chain about her slender neck; a gem in itself worth a fortune.
Evidently she was the personage expected. As she appeared the manager went forward to meet her. She smiled at him in a friendly, affable manner. With him at her side, she and her companion went up the big room, towards a specially reserved table, the head-waiter and a little group of others following behind.
As she came up the room, a man seated at one of the tables in the center of the room said to his neighbour:
"Who is that girl? The whole hotel is falling over itself to wait on her."
The speaker was a short, thick-set man, with a red face and fishy eyes.
"That's Pansy Langham, the millionairess," his neighbour replied. "She came over in her yacht from Teneriffe this afternoon. Barclay her name was before she came into her money."
"A millionaire, is she? That's the second one of the species in Grand Canary then. For there's a French millionaire staying in a villa at the back here. Le Breton, his name is. But what's brought the girl to these parts? There's not much here to attract a woman with money."
"She's here for her health, I believe."
"Not lungs, surely! She looks healthy enough."
"No, she had an accident about a couple of months ago. Some half-mad horse mauled her horribly, all but killed her. I remember reading about the case in the papers. They say she's a very decent sort, in spite of her millions. Gives an awful lot away in charity."
As the girl approached the table, the red-faced man screwed an eyeglass into one fishy eye and surveyed her from head to foot.
"She's not bad looking," he said in a condescending manner, as if it were his prerogative to criticise every woman who crossed his horizon. "But she's not a patch on the red-haired woman in the villa at the back here. Now, she's what I call a beauty."
He did not trouble to lower his voice, and his words reached Pansy.
She glanced in his direction and wrinkled her pretty nose, as if she were smelling a bad smell. And with no more notice than that, she passed on to her own table.
Just off the main road between the Port and the city of Las Palmas, Grand Canary, a villa stood. It was situated on a hill; a white, flat-roofed building, set in a pleasant garden. Long windows opened on a lawn surrounded by trees.
Out from one of the windows a flood of light streamed and mingled with the silver of the night. The apartment it came from was elaborately furnished, in an ornate French style, with gilded furniture, bevelled mirrors, and satin-covered chairs and lounges.
On one of the latter a woman lolled back amongst an array of soft cushions. She was big and voluptuous-looking, with a dead-white skin, a mass of flaming red hair, and eyes green as the emerald necklace she wore.
She had on an extremely low-cut, black satin dress, that suited her style and colouring. And she made a striking, if somewhat bizarre, picture.
But attractive and unique as she looked, the man sitting with her appeared more interested in the view from the window than in his companion.
From there, a glint of moonlit sea showed between the vaguely moving trees; a peaceful stretch that spread away to the purple, misty horizon.
He was a big man of about thirty, well groomed and handsome, with smooth black hair, close-clipped moustache, and dark, smouldering eyes that had a latent searching look at the back of them. He was in evening attire, with black pearl studs in his pleated dress shirt.
For some time the two had been sitting in silence; the man's gaze on the sea; the woman's on the man, in a hungry, anxious manner.
"You've got one of your restless moods on to-night, Raoul," she said presently.
"I get them frequently nowadays. Nothing ever satisfies me for long."
She smiled at him, a soft, slow smile.
"Yet I have satisfied you longer than most, for you are still here with me."
"It's not you so much, Lucille, as business that keeps me here."
"I believe you have no heart at all," she cried, a catch of pain in her voice. "You look upon all women as animals."
"You are a most handsome animal, you must agree," he replied.
"You talk as if you'd bought me."
"I don't know that I ever put it quite so crudely as that."
"Put it as crudely as you like," she cried in a sudden gust of temper. "You have taken all from me and given me nothing in return."
He made no reply. In a slightly amused manner his glance rested on her emerald necklace.
"You may look," she went on passionately. "But I want more than gifts. I want love, not just to be the creature of your passions."
"Then you want too much. There's no such thing as love between men and women. There's only passion."
"You are cruel," she moaned.
"Cruel! Merely because I refuse to be enslaved by any one woman, eaten up in mind and body and soul, as some of the men I know are? I wasn't brought up to look upon women as superior beings, and I've never met one yet to make me want to change my sentiments. They are here for my convenience and pleasure, and nothing more."
There was silence again.
Lucille sighed.
She knew she had no hold over him other than her sex, and never had had. Heroics, temper and entreaties had no effect on him whatsoever; he remained always unmoved and indifferent.
With a shrug she picked out a chocolate from a large box at her side. Then she changed the conversation.
"What's the business, Raoul? I'd no idea you had any here. I thought ours was a pleasure trip, purely—or impurely."
"The business is strictly private," he replied, a savage note in his voice.
A month before, on leaving Paris, when Le Breton had asked Lucille Lemesurier, the actress, to accompany him on his yacht and spend a week or so in Grand Canary, it had been for pleasure solely.
But a few days ago a letter had reached him.
A letter to the effect that his enemy, now Sir George Barclay, had been appointed governor of Gambia. The Sultan Casim Ammeh was waiting in Grand Canary until certain that his man wasen routefor his new post.