"I am going to try my vernacular on the bride," Ryder had told her. "Don't linger or look alarmed. I won't give the show away." So there was no one to overhear a low-toned colloquy between the bride and the veiled woman, no one to note or wonder that the veiled woman was speaking, strangely enough, in rapid English. "When I didn't hear from you I had to come, to know if you received the package and letter I sent--" With a swift gesture of her little ringed hand Aimée drew from the laces on her bosom that heavy gold locket. "Indeed I have it--and the note, too, I found. But I could not write you. There was no way--no one to trust to mail it. And they had stolen my key," she whispered, and the confessing words with their quiver of forlornness told Ryder something of the story of those helpless days and nights. He murmured, "I didn't dare write you more personally for fear they would find the note." "I understood. That plaid about the box--that was so clever a warning. I kept the box and hunted in it." "I wanted to tell you more about that locket. I dug it up myself from the tomb I was excavating--do you remember how you wished that I would dig from the sands whatever secret I most desired? And I found that.... And it happened that at McLean's I had met the French agent who was searching for any trace of the Delcassés, of the wife and child of the explorer who had disappeared fifteen years before. That miniature was your image, and I guessed at once. McLean and I went to the pasha--Oh, I didn't tell him I'd met you!" he flung in, his eyes twinkling, "and we pretended we knew all about his marriage to Madame Delcassé and he owned up without a quiver. But when we tried to claim you for the French family, he doubled like a hare. He said the Delcassé child was dead, died when his own child was a baby, and that you were his own. But I was sure that you were more than fourteen, and that he was simply putting it over on us so as to have this marriage go on without interference--and so I tried to get the story to you. Even now I thought you ought to know," he added, as if in palliation of his invasion here. For he realized now how tremendous an invasion it was. All the guests about him had not given him that feeling, all that sea of femininity, those grave matrons whose serenely unveiled faces would burn with shame to be beheld by this stranger, those bright, slim girls in their extravagant frocks, their tulle, their lace, their pearls, their diamonds, all the hidden charms that no man had yet seen stirred in him no more than an excited and adventurous curiosity.