"Noticed you!" laughed Miss Morris, scornfully. "How could she help
it? You are always in the way. You are at the door whenever they go
out or come in, and when we are visiting mosques and palaces you are
invariably looking at her instead of the tombs and things, with a
wistful far-away look, as though you saw a vision. The first time you
did it, after you had turned away I saw her feel to see if her hair was
all right. You quite embarrassed her."
"I didn't--I don't!" stammered Carlton, indignantly. "I wouldn't be so
rude. Oh, I see I'll have to get another confidante; you are most
unsympathetic and unkind." But Miss Morris showed her sympathy later in
the day, when Carlton needed it sorely; for the dinner towards which he
had looked with such pleasurable anticipations and lover-like
misgivings did not take place. The Sultan, so the equerry informed
him, had, with Oriental unexpectedness, invited the Duke to dine that
night at the Palace, and the Duke, much to his expressed regret, had
been forced to accept what was in the nature of a command. He sent
word by his equerry, however, that the dinner to Mr. Carlton was only a
pleasure deferred, and that at Athens, where he understood Carlton was
also going, he hoped to have the pleasure of entertaining him and
making him known to his sisters.
"He is a selfish young egoist," said Carlton to Mrs. Downs. "As if I
cared whether he was at the dinner or not! Why couldn't he have fixed
it so I might have dined with his sisters alone? We would never have
missed him. I'll never meet her now. I know it; I feel it. Fate is
against me. Now I will have to follow them on to Athens, and something
will turn up there to keep me away from her. You'll see; you'll see.
I wonder where they go from Athens?"
The Hohenwalds departed the next morning, and as their party had
engaged all the state-rooms in the little Italian steamer, Carlton was
forced to wait over for the next. He was very gloomy over his
disappointment, and Miss Morris did her best to amuse him. She and her
aunt were never idle now, and spent the last few days of their stay in
Constantinople in the bazars or in excursions up and down the river.
"These are my last days of freedom," Miss Morris said to him once, "and
I mean to make the most of them. After this there will be no more
travelling for me. And I love it so!" she added, wistfully.
Carlton made no comment, but he felt a certain contemptuous pity for
the young man in America who had required such a sacrifice. "She is
too nice a girl to let him know she is making a sacrifice," he thought,
"or giving up anything for him, but SHE won't forget it." And Carlton
again commended himself for not having asked any woman to make any
sacrifices for him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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