CHAPTER X
THE HAND
The reason for O'Rourke's lightning change of front was not far to seek; indeed, when mam'selle raised her eyes, it was to see it and to comprehend.
While the Irishman had been standing before the woman, holding her hands and bending low his head that he might not miss one of her hardly uttered words, the stillness of the great, vacant palace struck sharply upon his sentience.
His ears were trained to a quickness; the creaking and the rustle in the adjacent rooms might well be those sounds which are never absent from an abandoned dwelling after nightfall.
But, O'Rourke, after learning that the woman was the daughter of the Turkish diplomat, Constantine Pasha, had not been slow to identify the building to which she had caused him to be led; plainly enough, it must be the former home of her late father, abandoned to decay and the dry rot of Egypt after its owner's death.
And he was by no means satisfied that, because the place was the property of mam'selle, she was alone in it, as appearances at first had seemed to indicate—that is, alone save for the Nubian slave.
He remembered having remarked the place in his wanderings about Cairo—a huge, rambling hotel of two stories, covering much ground, with the outward seeming of absolute desolation.
It came to him, then, that no fitter place in all Cairo, no
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