long resist such a temptation. His eyes flashed, and with a rapid movement he turned round and embraced the girl’s lithe body with his arm.
A stop was put to further familiarities, however, for this little adventure, which was very distasteful to Heideck, was suddenly interrupted.
Without being perceived by those sitting at the table, the handsome young page of the Prince had stepped from the door of the bungalow with a plate of bananas and mangoes in his hand. For a few seconds he regarded with flashing eyes the scene just described, and then, stealing nearer with noiseless steps, flung, without saying a word, the plate with the fruit with such vigour and unerring aim at the dark beauty, that the girl, with a loud cry, clasped her hand upon her wounded shoulder, while the fragments of china fell clattering to the ground.
The next moment she and her companion had disappeared in hurried flight. The Prince’s face was livid with rage; he sprang up and seized the riding-whip which lay near him.
Heideck was on the point of intervening in order to save the disguised girl from a similar punishment to that which his new friend had meted out the day before to his Indian “boy,” but he soon saw that his intervention was unnecessary.
Standing bolt upright and with an almost disdainful quiver of his fair lips, the young page stepped straight up to the Prince. A half-loud hissing word, the meaning of which Heideck did not understand, must have suddenly pacified the wrath of the Russian, for he let his upraised arm fall and threw the whip on to the table.
“Go and fetch us another plate of dessert, Georgi,” he said quietly, as if nothing had happened. “It’s a confounded nuisance, that these Indian vagabonds don’t allow one a moment’s peace.”
A triumphant smile played across the face of the Circassian beauty. She threw a friendly glance at Heideck and silently returned to the bungalow. Full of admiration and not without a slight emotion of envy for the happy possessor of such an entrancing female beauty, Heideck followed her with his eyes, as she tripped gracefully away with her lithe graceful figure. A remark was just on the point of passing his lips, acquainting the Prince
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