For the first time he had felt himself outwitted by a woman, beaten, made mock of.

Now he was being shut away from her.
Inwardly raging as he was, hot, confused, unhorsed, still a strange, fingering insinuation of something agreeable had begun to waken in him.

The Master, not understanding it at all, or being able to analyze sensations so foreign to all his previous thought and experience, cut the Gordian knot of puzzlement by roundly cursing himself, by Allah and the Prophet's beard, as a fool.

And with a vastly disturbed mind he returned along the white, gleaming corridor--that dipped and swayed with the swift rush of _Nissr_--back to his own cabin.
There he found the buzzer of his little desk-telephone intermittently calling him.
"Yes, hello ?" he answered, receiver at ear, as he sat down in the swivel-chair of aluminum with its hydrogen cushion.
The voice of the wireless man, Menendez, reached him.

In a soft, Spanish-accented kind of drawl, Menendez said: "Just picked up two important radios, sir." "Well?
What are they ?" "International Air Board headquarters, in Washington, has been notified of our getaway.