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 "It was to remind you of their eyes," she said gravely. "Your own had the same look a moment ago when you asked me not to speak of you in the same breath with that poor Mr. Tinker."

"Indeed? That's rather odd," Ogle returned; and he smiled faintly. "Another lady told me exactly the same thing in Algiers."

"Another lady?"

"Someone I think you don't know," he said; and did not further satisfy her slight curiosity upon this point.

But, although at the moment he took the coincidence lightly, it annoyed him by remaining in his mind and recurring to him at intervals throughout the morning, so that by the time they stopped for lunch at the Arab village of Yakouren, he had begun to think of it rather poignantly. The provincial American girl and the experienced French woman-of-the-world had both made the same unpleasant personal comment upon his eyes, and while he liked it from neither of them, he bore it better from the "little American."

Then, wondering why the slurring comparison seemed less offensive coming from Olivia Tinker than from Aurélie Momoro, he did Olivia the justice to