Ashes of Incense 71

as they’ve no servants at the villa—only the over- seer, and he’s off in the vineyards with the men. You know Arabs, Mr. Templewaite, and if they’ve seen Michael going to that empty house alone—seen even his watch on him as he went ” the rounded shoulders shrugged expres- sively. “But Mrs. Templewaite goes to El Nahro alone, doesn’t she?” Dorofée remembered sud- denly, “and you don’t mind that?”

Guy Templewaite looked away from the child- ish eyes, only to meet those pale grey ones of the Persian cat. He wanted, man that he was, to scream: to turn from that garden and run and run and runl as far away and as fast as his legs would carry him. “Atmosphere,” to Guy Templewaite, meant—in Algiers——the oppression of the sinister. He had come there in the winter to work, and had not yet made money enough to go away. It was for that he was so anxious to see this actor-manager at Gibraltar, for that he wanted passionately to sell his play: to get out of Algiers. And to get Paula out of it. He would never have left her now, could he have afforded to have taken her with him, and had he not felt, besides, that to object to her visit to the Sargents would be to show himself unrea- sonably suspicious. Torn between all sorts of