"Oh, I don't know--I'm tired," she said, petulantly. "Besides, all the men are after that Ziska woman,--they seem to have lost their heads about her!"
"Ah!" and Dr. Dean rubbed his hands. "Yes--possibly! Well, she is certainly very beautiful."
"I cannot see it!" and Muriel Chetwynd Lyle flushed with the inward rage which could not be spoken. "It's the way she dresses more than her looks. Nobody knows who she is--but they do not seem to care about that. They are all raving like lunatics over her, and that man--that artist who arrived here to-day, Armand Gervase,--seems the maddest of the lot. Haven't you noticed how often he has danced with her?"
"I couldn't help noticing that," said the Doctor, emphatically, "for I have never seen anything more exquisite than the way they waltz together. Physically, they seem made for one another."
Muriel laughed disdainfully.
"You had better tell Mr. Denzil Murray that; he is in a bad enough humor now, and that remark of yours wouldn't improve it, I can tell you!"
She broke off abruptly, as a slim, fair girl, dressed as a Greek vestal in white, with a chaplet of silver myrtle-leaves round her hair, suddenly approached and touched Dr. Dean on the arm.
"Can I speak to you a moment?" she asked.
"My dear Miss Murray! Of course!" and the Doctor turned to her at once. "What is it?"
She paced with him a few steps in silence, while Muriel Chetwynd Lyle moved languidly away from the terrace and re-entered the ball-room.
"What is it?" repeated Dr. Dean. "You seem distressed; come, tell me all about it!"
Helen Murray lifted her eyes--the soft, violet-gray eyes that Lord Fulkeward had said he admired--suffused with tears, and fixed them on the old man's face.
"I wish," she said--"I wish we had never come to Egypt! I feel as if some great misfortune were going to happen to us; I do, indeed! Oh, Dr. Dean, have you watched my brother this evening?"
"I have," he replied, and then was silent.
"And what do you think?" she asked anxiously. "How can you account for his strangeness--his roughness--even to me?"
And the tears brimmed over and fell, despite her efforts to restrain them. Dr. Dean stopped in his walk and took her two hands in his own.
"My dear Helen, it's no use worrying yourself like this," he said. "Nothing can stop the progress of the Inevitable. I have watched Denzil, I have watched the new arrival, Armand Gervase, I have watched the mysterious Ziska, and I have watched you! Well, what is the result? The Inevitable,--simply the unconquerable Inevitable. Denzil is in love, Gervase is in love, everybody is in love, except me and one other! It is a whole network of mischief, and I am the unhappy fly that has unconsciously fallen into the very middle of it. But the spider, my dear,--the spider who wove the web in the first instance,--is the Princess Ziska, and she is NOT in love! She is the other one. She is not in love with anybody any more than I am. She's got something else on her mind--I don't know what it is exactly, but it isn't love. Excluding her and myself, the whole hotel is in love--YOU are in love!"