Dick read the meaning of the glance she flashed at him. Oddly enough, it expressed his own thought. They must endeavor to find out how Mrs. Haxton came to be such a close acquaintance of El Jaridiah's. Not only had he risked his life when he fancied she was in danger, but she, on her part, was willing to return with him to Massowah under cover of the night--to Massowah, whence she had fled in terror not many hours earlier. CHAPTER XI A WOMAN INTERVENES When Mrs. Haxton descended the yacht's gangway, and seated herself in the boat which had brought Abdullah from the shore, she threw a main with fate. But she was acting with her eyes open, whereas poor mortality is oft called on to take that dangerous hazard blindfold. During several haggard hours she had weighed her prospects in the scale of judgment, and the balance was wofully unfavorable. Wealth she had none; and now she saw position slipping away also. As sure as the sun would rise next day, so sure was it, as matters stood then, that exposure and humiliation must arrive. To this hard, level-headed, shrewd woman there was no blinking the outcome of an official inquiry. Alfieri was in Massowah, Alfieri, the man she had wronged as Delilah wronged Samson. If he were arrested, owing to Irene's abduction, he would demand to be confronted with von Kerber, would ask that she, too, should be arraigned with the Austrian, and put forward such an indisputable plea that, whatever the outcome for the Italian, her English friends must recoil from her with indignation. And there was worse in store. Mr. Fenshawe's generosity might provide the means of returning to Europe, but she would go back discredited, a mere adventuress, while the publicity attached to the yacht's errand could hardly fail to bring her name into fatal notoriety. In a word, social ruin stared her in the face, and the prospect was so unpleasing that her despairing glance turned more than once towards a dressing-case containing drugs whose labels spelt oblivion. Then came the Arab, with news of Irene's return, and, like any desperate gamester who ventures the last shreds of a wasted capital on some almost impossible chance, she determined to fight Alfieri to the end.