and high minarets, a mass of grey and brown, with here and there a splash of white, and here and there a single palm-tree, straggling formlessly across the green plain. The sky had clouded over; the track was now thronged with caravans of camels, and mules, and donkeys, and wayfarers on foot going to and coming from the town; and before the Bab Sagma, the great gate looking towards Mikkes, was reached, the rain was falling. Warrisden had sent on the soldier who had ridden with him from Tangier, to deliver a note to the Consul, and he waited with his animals and his men for the soldier's return. The man came towards dusk with word that a house had been secured in the town, and Warrisden passed through the gate and down between the high battlements of the Bugilud into the old town. And as he passed through the covered bazaars and the narrow streets, in the gloom of the evening, while the rain fell drearily from a sullen sky, his confidence of the morning departed from him, and a great depression chilled him to the heart. The high, cracked, bulging walls of the houses, towering up without a window, the shrouded figures of the passers-by, the falling light, the neglect as of a city of immemorial age crumbling in decay, made of Fez to him that night a place of gloom and forbidding mystery. He was in a mood to doubt whether ever he would look on Tony Stretton's face again. In the narrowest of the alleys, where each of his stirrups touched a wall, his guide stopped. It was almost pitch-dark here. By throwing back his head, Warrisden could just see, far above him, a little slit of light. His guide groped his way down a passage on the right, and at the end opened with a key a ponderous black door. Warrisden stepped over the sill, and found himself in a tiled court of which the roof was open to the sky. On the first floor there was a gallery, and on each of the four sides a long, narrow room, lofty, and closed with great folding doors, opened on to the gallery. In one of these rooms Warrisden had his bed set up. He sat there trying to read by the light of a single candle, and listening to the drip of the rain. When he left Tangier, he had twenty-one days before he need be at Roquebrune in answer to Pamela's summons. He had looked up the steamers before he started. Four of those days would be needed to carry them from Tangier to Roquebrune. He had reached Fez in five, and he thus had twelve days left. In other words, if Stretton came to Fez within a week, there should still be time, provided, of course, the road to the coast was not for the moment cut by rebellious tribes. That was the danger, as Warrisden's journey had told him. He discounted the timorous statements of his dragoman, Ibrahim, but one who knew had warned him at El Ksar. There was a risk.