The Palace of Darkened Windows

Again the knocking, muffled but softly insistent, and Arlee's eyes, heavy with tardy sleep, came slowly open, resting blankly on the glittering strangeness of the room. The dayl...

A one-eyed man with a stuffed crocodile upon his head paused before the steps of Cairo's gayest hotel and his expectant gaze ranged hopefully over the thronged verandas. It was...

Very slowly the black night grayed down into a wan, spectral morning, and slowly the gray morning paled into a dim mother-of-pearl dawn. And then suddenly the mother-of-pearline...

"Prisoners?" Her mind appeared but a hollow echo of his words. Her heart was dropping, dropping sickishly, into unending space. Then meaning stabbed her like a dentist's needle,...

Down in the court of Rameses, Lady Claire and Hill were straying. A most opportune old bachelor, passing with a party of acquaintances, had diverted even Emma Falconer from her...

Late as he went to sleep, Billy B. Hill was up in good season that Sunday morning. The need for cautioning Fritzi Baroff haunted him, and he was not satisfied until he had had b...

That stealthy touch brought Arlee half upright, shot with ghastly alarms. Her heart stopped beating; it stood still in the cold clutch of terror. The breath seemed to have left...

"Hill--Billy B. Hill," came the jubilant answer, and "Billy be damned!" said the astonished voice, with sudden joviality, and a dark shape strode up to them. "What on earth are...

Voices sounded below; footsteps hurried; a door slammed. Then feet upon the stairs, and a hand at the door. Arlee struggled to her feet in sudden terror; the candle was out and...

That limousine utterly routed the tiny little qualm which had been furtively worming into Arlee's thrill of adventure. Nothing very strange or out-of-the-way, she thought, could...

He had meant but forty winks, but it had been dark when his eyes closed and he opened them to the unreal half-lights of early dawn. The sky was pearl; the sands were fawn-colore...

On her own face the astonishment grew. "What you mean? Frederick--he not send you?" she gasped, and then as the outcries grew louder and louder behind them she gripped convulsiv...

Two miles of Sphinxes in the moonlight--a double row of them on each side of the way from the temple of Luxor--and then a towering pylon overhead. Karnak was reached.

"Of all the fanatic f----!" The sandy-haired young man checked his explosiveness in mid-air. He gave a glance at the bulge of bandage beneath Billy's coat sleeve and dropped int...

The March hare would have been a feeble comparison for Billy Hill's madness if Robert Falconer could have seen him that Saturday morning, that same Saturday on which Arlee was e...

He darted to the tumbled bed and flung aside the covers; he looked beneath it and beneath the couch; he sent a candle's light traveling about the empty whiteness of the bath. No...

Billy slapped on his hat with a clap of violence. She might have just _seen_ him! Then he got up and marched down the steps. There was no more use in camping on that veranda. Th...

The encounter in the bazaars that Thursday afternoon brought one more result to young Hill besides the bruise upon his chin and the privilege of bowing to Lady Claire and her vi...

Luxor was warm and drowsy with afternoon sun. Motionless the fronds of the tall palms along the water front; motionless the columns of the temple reflected in the blue Nile. Eve...

She said it cheerfully, but firmly, a sleepy, sunburned little nomad, sitting cross-legged in the sands, slowly plaiting her honey-colored hair. "Even this," she announced, indi...

Hour after hour the little boat held its steady course; hour after hour the distant banks flowed past in changing scenes. Forward on the narrow deck a girl sat in a lounge chair...

Now, when the card of Captain Kerissen was handed to Miss Arlee Beecher the next afternoon, when she sauntered in from the sunny out-of-doors and paused at the desk for the volu...

Two oil lamps flared in the little coffee-house. In one circle of yellow light two bearded Sheiks were playing dominoes with imperturbable gravity; the other lamp flickered over...