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The gentlemen rose as they entered, and one of them, in whom Cecil recognised her last night’s acquaintance, Denarien Bey, came to shake hands; while, to complete her mystification, she caught sight of Lady Haigh smiling and nodding at her from the other side of a long table. Denarien Bey placed chairs for the new arrivals—a proceeding which reminded Cecil forcibly of the words sometimes met with in the reports of trials, “the prisoner at the bar was accommodated with a seat,”—and then returned to his place, so that Cecil had time to look about her.

There were some eight or nine gentlemen present, the chief of whom seemed to be a grey-haired man at the end of the table. His face was in some way familiar to Cecil, but it was not at first that she remembered that she had seen him in close attendance on the Turkish Ambassador on his way to some State function. Next to him, on either side, sat Lady Haigh and Denarien Bey, and then came several vivacious, dark-eyed gentlemen in fezzes, who talked among themselves with a great deal of gesticulation, and seemed to bear a kind of national likeness to the Armenian envoy. Somewhat apart from the rest sat a stout elderly Englishman, with a stolid and unconvinced expression, and a general air of being present to keep other people from being imposed upon. There was also a secretary—a slim, dark-skinned youth in spectacles, who scribbled notes in a large clasped book, when he was not nibbling his pen and staring at Cecil; and lastly, at the very end of the table, Cecil and Miss Arbuthnot themselves. Cecil was in a hopeless state of amazement and mystification, feeling, moreover, a terrible inclination to giggle on finding herself the cynosure of all the eyes in the room. What could it all mean? Was it possible that Ahmed Khémi Pasha, who was said to be fond of European innovations, was going to found a High School in Baghdad? and was she to take charge of it? But no; Miss Arbuthnot had said that the situation was to be in a private family. What could be going to happen?