It was amid this singular scene that Mrs. Macalister made to Cecil Thorold her bizarre remark about a ghost. “What ghost?” the millionaire repeated, when the horsemen had passed. Then he remembered that on the famous night, now nearly a month ago, when the Hôtel St. James at Algiers was literally sacked by an organised band of depredators, and valuables to the tune of forty thousand pounds disappeared, Mrs. Macalister had given the first alarm by crying out that there was a ghost in her room. “Ah!” He smiled easily, condescendingly, to this pertinacious widow, who had been pursuing him, so fruitlessly, for four mortal weeks, from Algiers to Tunis, from Tunis back to Constantine, and from Constantine here to Biskra. “All Arabs look more or less alike, you know.” “But----” “Yes,” he said again. “They all look alike, to us, like Chinamen.” Considering that he himself, from his own yacht, had witnessed the total loss in the Mediterranean of the vessel which contained the plunder and the fleeing band of thieves; considering that his own yacht had rescued the only three survivors of that shipwreck, and that these survivors had made a full confession, and had, only two days since, been duly sentenced by the criminal court at Algiers--he did not feel inclined to minister to Mrs. Macalister’s feminine fancies. “Did you ever see an Arab with a mole on his chin?” asked Mrs. Macalister. “No, I never did.” “Well, my Arab had a mole on his chin, and that is why I am sure it was he that I saw a minute ago--over there. No, he’s gone now!” The competing horsemen appeared round the bend for the last time, the dancing-girls whinnied in their high treble, the crowd roared, and the Prix de la Ville was won and lost. It was the final race on the card, and in the _mêlée_ which followed, Cecil became separated from his adorer. She was to depart on the morrow by the six a.m. train. “Urgent business,” she said. She had given up the chase of the millionaire. “Perhaps she’s out of funds, poor thing!” he reflected. “Anyhow, I hope I may never see her again.” As a matter of fact he never did see her again. She passed out of his life as casually as she had come into it. He strolled slowly towards the hotel through the perturbed crowd of Arabs, Europeans, carriages, camels, horses and motor-cars. The mounted tribesmen were in a state of intense excitement, and were continually burning powder in that mad fashion which seems to afford a peculiar joy to the Arab soul. From time to time a tribesman would break out of the ranks of his clan, and, spurring his horse and dropping the reins on the animal’s neck, would fire revolvers from both hands as he flew over the rough ground. It was unrivalled horsemanship, and Cecil admired immensely the manner in which, at the end of the frenzied performance, these men, drunk with powder, would wheel their horses sharply while at full gallop, and stop dead.