“Then after a little time, my Lord, I went to find out if there was anything Miss Yamina would require, but she was no longer there!”

“She was no longer there?”

Lord Castleford’s voice was harsh.

“She’d gone, my Lord!”

“How could she have done? Someone must have seen her.”

Jenkins hesitated a moment.

“I noticed, my Lord,” he said after a moment, “that before we left the ship a sheet was missing from the bed Miss Yamina had slept on. I thought she must have put it in the trunk to make it more comfortable, but there is no sign of it here and she must have worn it in order to leave the Residency.”

“Worn it?” Lord Castleford ejaculated.

Even as he spoke, he knew that was the answer.

There was no difference between a white sheet and a ferejeh, which every Oriental woman wore.

In the streets, in the Turkish Bazaar of the Capital, there would be innumerable women wearing ferejehs, their garments covering them completely so that there was nothing distinctive about their features except for their eyes.

He realised that because of the excitement of his arrival in the Residency it would have been easy for Yamina to slip down a back staircase, find a side door and disappear.

That she had done so struck him like a blow.

He could not believe that she would leave him, could not credit after all they had said to each other, after all they had planned, that she would walk out of his life as mysteriously as she had come into it.

Too late he thought that perhaps in her own way she was as determined as he was.

She had cried out against his sacrificing his career on her behalf and, while he had the feeling that they would never lose each other completely, he thought that perhaps she was putting her own plan into operation.

That was to stay away from him until the war was over and they need no longer, as representatives of their different countries, be officially enemies.

‘She cannot mean it! She cannot intend to do that!’ Lord Castleford told himself and yet he was afraid.

Now he cursed himself for not having forced Yamina to tell him more about herself.

It seemed incredible, unbelievable, but he still did not know her name.

As she had said, it seemed so unimportant and one Russian name was very like another.

‘My darling! My precious!’ he cried out to her in his heart. ‘How can you do this to me? How can you make me suffer so intolerably?’

Only the self-control he had exercised all his life prevented him from crying out aloud at his suffering.

He knew that Jenkins was watching him apprehensively in case he should be blamed for what had happened and automatically he said,