"They would have none of him, for beneath the mighty pinions showed the white plumage of another race.

"And in the radiant light of day there came from the southern plains a white bird, crossing the hawk's path as a snowflake driven by Destiny across the desert wastes; and he encircled her, lifting her upon the wind of his great pinions higher, higher yet towards the eyrie in the solitary mountain peak.

"And as they mounted, those of his kind and those of her kind, who had followed, battled with him, for he was outcast from the one and the other. And the mist, which was the anger of the gods, closed down . . ."

The shadows seemed to deepen as the quiet voice stopped.

"And—" said Damaris gently, "—the end?"

"That is on the lap of the gods."

"I do not understand!"

She had not caught the end of Lady Thistleton's chatter, else would she have been able to interpret the little story, and the man, who had thought that his parents' mixed marriage was a common subject for gossip in the hotel—which it was—sprang to his feet, The future still held the moment when someone would enlighten her as to the lowliness of his caste.

"It is late," he said gravely in English. "Perhaps if you were to ask at the hotel, someone would interpret the little tale. And now will you not return, for fear they come in search of you? It is not wise to wander alone, at night, without a companion. Your dog———?"

Damaris laughed, the echoes binding the silvery sound like a soft wrapping about the wounds and bruises Time had left upon the ruins.

"Wellington? Oh, he cut his foot badly this morning. And I—I want to go to the hall built like a tent."

"The great Festal Hall of Totmes III?"

The man made no other comment; it was not for him to offer himself as dragoman.

"Will you—take me there, if you know the way?"

"Verily would I be thy guide," came the passionate reply, "to guard thy feet against the stones which will surely be spread upon thy path."

Playing with fire! Yes, indeed!

Side by side they walked, the torch throwing a pool of radiance just ahead, until Damaris walked blindly into a column and cried aloud from the hurt of the stone against her shoulder.

It was then that she stretched out her hand for support, and tingled to her feet when sudden flames seemed to singe her finger-tips as they rested on the man's arm.

Through the Central Court and the Pylons and into the Hall of Records they went, until she tripped and crashed to her knees, and, rising, slipped her hand into the man's and stood for a moment with thudding heart when, closing fiercely round hers, it seemed to burn her whole being.

Hand in hand they stood, seeing, by reason of the gloom, vastly little of the columns which have the strange shape of tent-poles; then walked warily and still hand in hand in and out of various and dilapidated chambers.

"I—I don't want to go back, but I think it must be very late, so———"

They were standing near the chapel with the granite altar as she spoke, and had turned to retrace their way when she flashed her light upon a flight of steps.

Strange is the fascination and desolation of steps leading to an empty dwelling and almost as mysterious as the door ajar in an empty house.

She stood in the little room and swept the light across the walls upon which are represented the animals and flowers brought from Syria century upon century ago.

Then the light, which had been growing dimmer and dimmer, went out.

And it was the man this time who tackled the situation.

"I am your guide. I know the way in the dark."

He spoke in English as he swept the girl into his arms, carrying her like a feather down the great temple where perchance he had held her against his heart century upon century ago, even when the flowers and animals had been brought from Syria.

"May I drive you home? I should love to," he said, as he placed her on her feet near the car. He spoke in English, with an eagerness out of keeping with the trivial request, and which was merely the expression of a desire to be with her under commonplace circumstances.

"Please do. I don't think I could—I am so tired."

The gafir was accustomed to the strange habits of the white people, but, although almost drunken with slumber, he peered closely and furtively at the driver.

"Thank you so much," said Damaris gravely, with her hand against a mark upon her cheek caused by the pressure of an amulet made of a scarab-shaped emerald in a dull gold setting, and which Hugh Carden Ali wore night and day above his heart. "Is there anything else as wonderful to see as the Temple?"

"Deir el-Bahari."

The man spoke curtly and made no further comment; not for him was it to offer himself as guide.

"Ah! yes, of course—but people go to it in crowds, and one has to follow behind a guide in a procession."

"One is not obliged to return with the crowd, nor to listen to the dragoman, who knows nothing about the incense-trees of Punt which were planted upon the terrace to perfume the air under the light of the full moon, in the days of Queen Hatshepu."

With apparent abruptness she ended the conversation:

"I share my godmother's great faith in you. Good night."

She put out her hand as he salaamed with hands to brow and lips and heart. Perhaps that was why he failed to see it.

Or was it, perhaps, that he still felt the softness of her against his heart?

If you are dying of thirst, one drop of water will not assuage you!



CHAPTER XVIII

"A handful of meal in a barrel, and a little oil in a cruse."

I KINGS.

Whilst Damaris was trying to soothe her wounded pride at Karnak, Ben Kelham was suffering the tortures of the nethermost pit down Assouan way.

His heart was not in "lion" at all, it was literally at Damaris' feet.

He had not rushed away in pique after her refusal of him on the night of the fancy-dress ball; nor with any vague idea of causing her to regret her decision in realising the vacuum, in her existence which his absence might make. He had not an ounce of subtlety or vanity in his nature. He had gone because he thought it would be the decent thing to do as far as she was concerned, and also to hide his hurt and disappointment, which were deep. The rumour of lion was genuine and the excitement, extending far down the Nile, intense. In fact, with the aid of the Oriental's prodigal imagination the one royal beast of feminine persuasion which was reported as having been seen prowling around Deir el-Bahari had been multiplied to two pairs ravaging the outskirts of Assouan.

He sat drinking coffee with jolly Sybil Sidmouth and her nerve-stricken stepmother in the lounge of the Savoy Hotel in Assouan just at the moment when Damaris sat herself down on the broken column in the Hypostyle Hall.

"Jolly bad luck we've had, haven't we?" said Sybil.

Kelham nodded his head. The last post had come in, with nothing for him but a few letters from home.

"Yes, rotten!" he replied after a moment. "She might have sent me a line."

Sybil's stepmother moved restlessly in her chair.

Ridden with nerves, she was also mother of twin-daughters neurotic and plain who, sered by nature and yellowed by time and on the wrong side of the matrimonial hedge, had been only too glad to foist her on to the plump shoulders of jolly, capable, pretty Sybil and to get rid of them both for the winter.

In the last week or so a sprouting of hope had pierced the matchmaking soil in the querulous lady's really well-intentioned heart, for, like the proverbial half-loaf, a step-son-in-law is distinctly better than none at all.

But Sybil only smiled at the absent-mindedness of the young man's remark.

For weeks she had been the recipient of his confidences. He had dragged her, suffocating, down into the mud-depths of the diffidence in which he wallowed; had tugged her, gasping, to the Olympian heights from which he viewed a world of love, all rosy-red; had flung her, well-nigh senseless from exhaustion, upon the saw-teethed rocks of despair; and had taken her paddling in the wash of his vapourings.

She was absolutely heart-whole, with a firm belief in the "lion" rumour, and later, long after the end of this story, became the jolly, popular wife of the great eye-specialist to whom she had rushed when, after a soul-shaking scene with her step-sisters, she had missed the target entirely at Bisley.

As it happened, the duchess had written, but in a moment of most unusual aberration had put Khartoum on the envelope instead of Assouan, so that it was months, long after the end of this story, that the letter reached him. Strange is it how the lives of men are wrecked or made through the most trivial happenings.

The grain of dust in the eye; the mudbank in the river; the hen in the road! Just think of the outcome of such insignificant incidents.

The last letter he had received had been written in Heliopolis on the eve of her grace's sudden decision; the one that had gone astray had been mailed in Luxor, and had contained the request that, when he had shot the lion he would take the carcase or the skin as a present to Damaris at the Winter Palace Hotel and wait there until her return from the Oasis of Khargegh.

There was no doubt about the fact that he was genuinely in love.

Lion or no lion in the vicinity, he would sit dreaming for hours amongst the rock tombs at full noon or fall of evening or by the light of the sickle-moon; a perfectly absurd proceeding where big game is concerned. Food or sleep meant nothing to him, so that his usual good-temper was sharpened and his undoubted good looks enchanced by a certain romantic gauntness under the cheek-bone. People seemed as ghosts to him, so absorbed was he in his love and his pain; so that his act of rising when Mrs. Sidmouth took what she thought to be a diplomatic departure was purely mechanical.

Then Sybil laughed, a jolly, ringing laugh, and laid her hand upon his arm.

"Why don't you run up to Heliopolis?"

"By jove, Sybil, that's an idea. You come along, too. Damaris would love to meet you; you're just her sort. Besides, there's nothing doing in lion here, it's only a yarn. Let's pack to-night and get off to-morrow. I'll go and see if we can get a private steamer—can't stick a public one, stopping every other minute to look at tombs!"

Sybil laughed.

"We'll go, Ben, it will be ripping. But to-morrow! How exactly like a man!"

Ben was contrite. He thought Sybil travelled with a kit-bag and her guns; he had forgotten Mamma.

Mamma protested. She was an invalid, with all an invalid's paraphernalia.

They started after the passing of a week in which Mrs. Sidmouth had a series of nerve-storms, and in which Sybil, to pass the time, wrote a four-page letter to Ellen Thistleton, which she duly received at breakfast.

They certainly did not stop en route to look at temples or tombs, but they made quite a long halt on the sandbank just above Luxor, onto which boats of all sizes and shapes so often run. The loss of time is irritating enough, goodness knows, in ordinary travelling and occurs quite frequently, but when one is love-driven and this maddening delay happens, then you have to make as big an exercise of self-control as when you rush onto the platform only to see the guard's van of your train disappearing into the tunnel.

And surely the gods laughed long and loud when Damaris chose that very day to return by public steamer from Denderah where she had been to visit the Temple of Hathor the Egyptian Aphrodite.



CHAPTER SIX

"But still his tongue ran on, the less Of weight it bore, with greater ease."

BUTLER.

Lady Thistleton's daughters were exhaustively energetic. It belied their colouring, which was dun and which, though of the same family, is distinct from mousey. It has infinitely more vim and a vast endurance and a great patience; also is it sullen and boring, but reliable.

Ellen, the elder, had been engaged to a younger son of The Inverness of Inverness. His colouring, except of course for the eyes, which were of a snapping blue, reminded one of a tomato salad dressed with chilis and smothered in mustard-sauce. His temper corresponded. They had fought over everything until they had smashed their engagement.

Berenice was engaged to a parson in Edinburgh, one of the Smythe-Smythes of London. She made a doormat of herself, loving the herculean minister, and, though longing to stay at home and get married, had, at her lover's earnest request, consented to accompany her mother and sister to Egypt instead.

To his fervent mind the loss of a few months of married life would be compensated for by the biblical discourses upon the Land of Moses with which, later on, as his wife, she would be able to enliven Mother's Meetings.

They admired Damaris a lot, though her independence and colouring shocked them not a little. In the seclusion of the double bedroom, as they brushed or twisted their lanky locks in Hindes', they whispered about her love-affair, which had presumably gone agley, and thrilled with a distinct feeling of wrong-doing over the gossip anent the mythical Sheikh.

If they had asked Damaris about the myth, she would have told them everything quite simply and truthfully. This would have cleared up the mist but spoilt the feeling of wrong-doing.

Lady Thistleton was large and recumbent and averse to sight-seeing, but after a heart-to-heart talk with her daughters had seen to it that Damaris had no time for moping.

Damaris went here, there and everywhere; played tennis; paid duty-calls, as you must when somebody extends her wing-feathers as shelter; acted in charades; attended concerts; and was thoroughly miserable.

Jane Coop was miserable too; so was the bulldog, and, through a certain unconfessed and indefinable vigilance they both felt called upon to exercise in behalf of their beloved mistress, were distinctly nervy.

"Drat the men!" had said the maid, giving pithy verbal expression to the ragged state of her nerves as she cut the stalks of the beautiful flowers which came daily without name or message. The dog's method of expressing himself was somewhat more violent; it consisted of the sudden seizure between his great teeth of the posterior portion of the nether garments of low-caste males, white or coloured.

You could almost tell the status of the male bipeds by casting a discreet eye upon their raiment, and as there was not a muzzle in Egypt big enough to fit the dog, it had ended in him being led or chained in polite society.

Damaris's table was next that of the Thistletons, who, with a vague memory maybe of their duty towards their neighbour as instilled on Sundays into their rebellious infantile heads, chatted brightly to right and to left of them at meals.

Full of the milk of human kindness, they allowed it to overflow into their writhing neighbours' jugs.

They broke through the glacial atmosphere which surrounds the Britisher's breakfast-table; newspaper propped against jam-pot was no barrier; their gladsome invitations or suggestions, dammed for the moment, would rise at last level with the paper's edge to trickle down the other side and mingle with the eggs and bacon, porridge, kidneys, or whatever trifle the plate might contain.

They read out scraps of news from the morning paper; they read out bits of home news from their stacks of correspondence, written for the most part on eight pages and in the sprawling, uncontrolled script of the woman who has nothing but trivialities with which to fill her day.

Their blood was blue, their upbringing beyond suspicion; they simply erred through a too-generous supply of the above-mentioned philanthropic fluid.

They had come home dead-beat the night before, but were first down to breakfast, as happy as could be at the thought of the strenuous day before them, and were ostentatiously comparing their books of notes or jottings when Damaris came in. They went everywhere with note-books in their hands, and made entries at the most inconvenient moments during their journey. To you or me they would have seemed but jottings, but Berenice could have read you a blank-verse love-poem in the thick markings of her fountain-pen; and Ellen a De Profundis from the hieroglyphics and inscriptions copied by her scratchy stylo and under which she essayed to bury the memory of the tomato-hued Inverness.

Damaris slid into her seat with an inward prayer that she might be allowed time to read her mail, which consisted of a fat letter from her godmother and a bulky one from home. "Perhaps Marraine will be back soon," she thought, opening the other letter first, as is a way with us perverse humans. Enclosed was an atrociously-written letter to her mother from her plain-as-a-pikestaff brother, written from Harrow.

". . . it's awfully jolly," wrote the enthusiastic youngster, "being in Ben Kelham's house. They still talk about his last house-match against Bumbles. Don't you remember I'd just got over mumps and we went down for it? Bumbles had six to win and ten minutes to do it in when Howard was bowled, and Carden, their captain, went in and drove right over the Pav. He won the match by one, don't you remember? And then Kelham caught him magnificently in the slips just as time was up."

Damaris looked at a bunch of jasmine lying beside her plate, and sighed as she opened her godmother's letter; then sighed again, more profoundly.

The duchess had arrived at Khargegh without mishap. She described the journey, gradually ascending through the desert, then down through the narrow valley of rocks—the wastes of rock and gravel—the beautiful valley—the great plain to Mahariq-Khargegh with its date-palms, its filthy lanes, its mosques, with the limestone hills almost surrounding it.

"And we can't get any further, my dear. A report has come of the appearance near here of a notorious robber gang which has infested the desert farther south for years. I don't believe it myself—Hobson is furious, as the hotel we are in is not totally devoid of—shall I call them mosquitoes?—but the authorities refuse to allow us to proceed. I have sent a runner through to the friend I was going to see."—Damaris touched the jasmine at her side and sighed. "I will tell you the whole history when I return. So sad, my child; so very tragic. She may come to see me, as the authorities have no power over her. She is staying at her eldest son's house until his return. I will let you know my movements as soon as I can. Enjoy yourself. Dekko is very quiet; he is either apprehensive or going to moult."

Damaris smiled spasmodically when, as she put the letter down under the jasmine, her neighbours let off a broadside.

The head dragoman wanted to get up a party for Deir el-Bahari on the morrow. He had twenty pairs of donkeys, all of which were so accustomed, it seemed, to going about in a bunch that they refused to move a step if one pair was missing. Nineteen pairs had been filled from the different hotels, one pair was still minus riders. Would Damaris make a couple with Mr. Lumlough?

Mr. Lumlough, who was of the raw age of nineteen and who worshipped in secret at the girl's shrine, blushed divinely salmon-pink and coughed.

Damaris shook her head.

She longed to see the Temple, as she longed to go to Denderah, but not in a crowd; also, she longed to confide all her secrets (of which her visit to the Temple of Amnon was not one of the least) to her godmother. She was just the slightest bit scared, and, being very young, felt incapable of prescribing for her burnt finger-tips.

She had only to keep away from the fire, but, as I have already said, she was very young.

"Do, Damaris! We are taking our lunch on donkeys, as well."

"But why not let the empty pair go without riders? Or let Mr. Lumlough go on one and let the other trot by its side without anyone? I'm sure it would love a holiday."

No! These twenty pairs of donkeys belonged to an asinine Trades Union. The twenty pairs went together or not at all; they went up the steep hill with a human being on their backs or not at all; if one solitary moke out of the forty trades-unionists should be asked to climb a hill with nothing on its back, it would not move one step—no, not if the most luscious carrot feast awaited it at the top; and if it refused to budge, the thirty-nine others would support it by also refusing to budge! Yes! even if they held up the whole of the tourist season for eternity and never again tasted luscious carrot in all the years allotted to the asinine race. What is the good of customs if you don't stick to them? The donkeys' parents had always climbed that hill heavily-laden, and what was good enough for them was also good enough for their descendants!

"I think it's horrid of you, Damaris. Besides, what are you going to do all by yourself?" said Ellen, opening a letter bits of which she proceeded to read out. "Here's a letter from Sybil Sidmouth. She and Mr. Kelham are having a very poor time sitting about in the rocks and tombs all day and half the night."

"How romantic!" sighed Berenice. "All alone with Nature in an Egyptian desert! It reminds me of Omar's Jug and Loaf verse. How does it go?" She flipped through her notebook. "Ah! here it is." And she proceeded to read, with appropriate punctuation with her tea-spoon on the edge of her saucer:

"A book of verses underneath the bough A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and Thou Beside me, singing in the wilderness; O, wilderness were Paradise enow!"

She looked up, suddenly, surprised and indignant, at Ellen, who had kicked her violently under the table; then she tried to cover up her confusion at her unfortunate faux pas.

"Mrs. Sidmouth, of course, is far from well," she continued. But Ellen broke in, in her high staccato and appalling French:

"Revenons a nos moutons—or at least, our donkeys." She looked at Damaris, who, with over-bright eyes, laughed whole-heartedly at the feeble joke. "Do change your mind, Damaris. The guide is Yussuf, the very best, you know. Besides, we might see the lion."

"All right," said Damaris, tucking the jasmine into the belt of her white dress, which she had never done before. "I'll come. Twenty pairs of donkeys climbing up a hill will be an awfully funny sight,—don't you think so, Mr. Lumlough?"

She smiled across at Mr. Lumlough, who was thereupon transported to the portals of the seventh heaven with a piece of toast and marmalade in his right hand.



CHAPTER XX

"I was never less alone than when by myself."

GIBBON.

Next morning, with her chaperon's energetic daughters, Damaris found herself one of the herd foregathered on the Nile bank preparatory to the excursion to the Valley of the Kings, and later in the afternoon by mountain path over the ridge to that marvel of antiquity the Terrace-Temple of Deir el-Bahari.

"I don't want to go, Janie dear," she said, the preceding night, whilst the devoted maid wielded strong-bristled brushes on the burnished short-cropped hair.

"Better go, dearie. One must be polite, even if the heart breaks."

Jane Coop's literary plane swung between a three-penny weekly entitled "Real Stories from High Life" and Ouida's novels, which latter she had bought second-hand in the Charing Cross Road and kept sandwiched between her Bible and "Grandmother's Herb Recipes."

"But I don't want to go. I hate crowds, and I can't take Wellington. Every native flies from him since he got behind the Musical Colossus and growled. You remember? They thought it was the statue speaking, and the dear old darling was only trying to catch a lizard."

The bulldog loathed Egypt.

He was always either in disgrace or being talked to in baby language. He had seen next to nothing of his beloved mistress, and his digestion had been almost ruined by the amount of chocolates he had eaten out of pure boredom.

"Take me," he said, every time his beloved went out, as plainly as could be by means of his beautiful face and down-cast tail. But excursions had grown rarer and rarer and his slender middle more and more defined through grief.

"My heart isn't breaking, Janie!" Damaris declared, sitting up in bed.

"I know it isn't, dearie. There's nothing to break it over, I'm sure. I was just repeating from 'Her Scarlet Sin', where the beautiful heroine is torn between two stools as it were."

Jane Coop had no use for knights who left the field of combat; and as for the tales which were duly carried to her of an Arabian chief who followed her young mistress in the desert and sent her bunches of flowers and such-like trash, well! it was all you could expect if you left your own country for heathen parts!

To Jane Coop, rides in the desert in Egypt were just as much a part of the day's programme as rides on donkeys at holiday-time had been in Margate, before interfering people began to make a fuss about the rider's weight.

"You mind your own hedges, Maria Hobson, and see that your own cattle don't go a-straying, with their monkey tricks," she had said tartly and not over-lucidly, to her grace's maid, who had heard from someone who had heard from someone else that Miss Hethencourt was out at all hours of the night, here, there and everywhere. "I know what time she comes in and where she has been, and who with, and that's quite enough for me. Thank you, I can shepherd my own flock!"

She was not exactly within the confines of truth in her statement, but having learned in her youth to diagnose the hurt of dumb animals, she felt she was fully qualified to treat her beloved child's unrest without any verbal aid from outsiders.

Yet something, a warning from the future, maybe, had prompted her to speak this night as she stood beside the bed, looking down upon the beauty of the child to whom she seemed, more than anyone else, to stand in the position of sponsor.

"Will you promise me one thing, dearie?"

She stroked the red head lovingly as it leant against the motherly bosom upon which had so often rested errant lambs and stricken pullets.

"Yes, Janie darling. I would promise you anything!"

"I know things are going crosswise a bit with you, dearie, as they always do in an unknown country; but I don't worry about that, because at the crossways there is always a signpost. But now that we are in this heathen land, I want your promise that you will always tell me where you are going to when you go out—always. If it's out for a ride in the desert or over amongst them mummy-tombs, or out to a tennis-party or dance. Will you, dearie? Always?"

The insistence in the demand made the girl look up into the homely face and she did not smile as she made a little cross above her heart in the manner of children.

"I promise, Janie—cross heart. And I'm starting out early-early to-morrow morning on an excursion to the Tombs of the Kings. We are taking lunch with us—paper-bags and remnants of sandwiches amongst Egypt's dead—tea at the Rest House and———"

She stopped for a minute, then continued slowly:

"———and if I don't come back with the rest, Janie dear, don't worry. It's full moon, and I may stay to see the Temple by moonlight."

A moment's silence; then said practical Jane:

"And as you can't take Wellington, dearie, will you promise to take your revolver? You know, they say lions have been seen in———"

Damaris laughed.

"They've left, Janie! They're all at Assouan, waiting to be shot by Mr. Kelham and Miss Sidmouth."

Jane Coop sniffed as she tucked in the bed-clothes and kissed her child good-night.

She had got to the door when Damaris spoke.

"Janie, you know all about birds, don't you?"

"Hens, dearie."

"Well!" The girl's voice came muffled, as though she had drawn the sheet about her face. "Supposing a hawk———"

"Hawks aren't hens, dearie."

"Well—hens! Supposing you had a breed of hens that were all—all—oh! any colour———"

"White Leghorns," said Jane Coop, who was beginning to get interested in this subject so near her heart.

"Yes. Well, supposing you found that one, when it had all its feathers, had some speckled ones under its wings——"

"But it couldn't, dearie, if it was pure-bred!"

"Yes, but just supposing it had, what would be the meaning of it?"

Jane Coop hesitated, and re-tied her apron-strings. Descriptive analysis was not her strong forte.

"Well, dearie, I should say that the male bird was a—a—oh! a Plymouth Rock, or something like that. The speckled bird would be a good one, but if it was mixed it would have to be turned out of the run if you had a fancy for showing and prizes. I remember a black—— But there now! what made you start your old Nannie talking about hens? Just you turn over and go to sleep, dearie. You have to be up and away early to-morrow, you know!"

She closed the door gently and left the girl alone.

"I don't understand," she said softly, and slipped out of bed to stand at the open window, with all the glory of an Egyptian night before her.

"I don't understand the meaning of the story," she repeated, as she watched the figure of a fellah wrapped in a big cloak which shone snow-white under the moon, trudging patiently across the grounds to the servants' quarters. Then, as the huge dog flung himself against her, she struck her hands together. The sudden impact sent her mind flying back to the first time she had seen Hugh Carden Ali, in English riding-kit and Mohammedan tarbusch in the bazaar; then in her memory she saw him dining as an Englishman; saw him riding with falcon upon fist—a very Eastern, saw him as an Arab of Arabia in the desert; again as an Englishman, save for the Mohammedan tarbusch, holding in the bay mare as she thundered past him on the stallion Sooltan.

In a flash she understood the tragic story of the Hawk of Egypt.

"The pity of it!" she whispered. "Oh! the cruel pity of it!" and crept back to bed.

* * * * * *

Wide-eyed and quiet, she stood very early next morning with the jostling, laughing crowd, waiting to be ferried across the Nile on the excursion to the Tombs of the Kings, which to most of the crowd ranked on a level with Madame Tussaud's Waxworks, with the difference that in the valley of desolation you could leave the remnants of your lunch anywhere, which is a habit strictly forbidden in the Marylebone Road.

Mounting the diminutive donkeys caused peals of laughter; the hamlets of Naza'er-Rizkeh and Naza'el Ba'irait rang with the cries of the cavalcade, and Damaris blindly followed Lady Thistleton's energetic offspring, as with note-book and pencil they followed the guide in and out of the regulation tombs of Biban el-Muluk, the history of which he repeated with parrot-like monotony.

Lucy Jones, lighthearted tourist, thought the lunch awfully jolly in the shade of the tomb, in fact, she made it a riotous feast, with the help of others as young and non-temperamental as herself.

After all, what did it matter?

As Lucy said, "The dead had been such a jolly long time dead," and the desolation of the valley made such a splendid contrast to the golden sunshine and violent blue of the sky.

The zig-zag path down to Deir el-Bahari occasioned more laughter and little screams and offers of help from the sterner male, who, under an extreme insouciance, tried to hide the insecurity of his perch on the back of the humble, scrambling quadruped.

When the laughing, jostling and somewhat dishevelled crowd streamed back down the second incline and across the Central Terrace, en route for the donkeys, it left Damaris standing with dancing eyes, and laughing mouth under the blue and star-strewn ceiling of the Shrine.

And when the last sound of laughter, and clattering stone under nimble hoof had melted away; when the sky had turned the marble temple mauve and pink and deepest red, and back to pink, to mauve, to softest white; when the first star had fastened the robe of day to the cloak of night, and silence had fallen like balm upon the wound caused by raucous voices, Damaris tip-toed down the steps and out into the Colonnade of Punt.

She was quite alone.



CHAPTER XXI

"No time so dark but through its woof there run Some blessed threads of gold."

C. P. CRANACH.

It is difficult—no, it is impossible to describe the wonder of Deir el-Bahari under the moon, just as it is impossible to describe "the light that never was, on land or sea," or the Taj Mahal, or a mother's love.

To our eyes it is the picture of desolation. Just as it must have been a picture of grandeur to those of the woman who built it, Queen Hatshepu, sister, wife and queen of Totmes III.

It is built in terraces to which you climb by gentle incline; it is surrounded and crossed by colonnades; there are ruined chapels and vestibules and recesses; an altar upon which offerings had once been made to the great gods; broken steps and closed and open doors, behind which the ghosts of dead kings and queens, priests, priestesses and nobles sit in ghostly council; through which they beckon you—if you belong.

There has surely come to each of us, in this short span we term life, the moment when, just introduced, we look into another's face and say or think, "We have met before."

May it not have been that we once met to burn incense together before the dread god Anubis, or to make offerings upon the altar erected to the great god Ra Hamarkhis; or was it perchance that you, if you are a woman, once waited at the temple gates to see him pass upon his return from the great expedition to the land of Punt, which we call Somaliland to-day?

Had the man with hawk-face who offers you a muffin or cup of tea to-day once brought you gifts of ivory, or incense, or skin of panther from the wonderland? Did he sweep the seething crowd with piercing eye to find the face beloved, and pass on to the rolling of drums, the crash of cymbals, the blaring of trumpets, to make obeisance to his monarch and return thanks to the mighty gods?

Perchance!

But Damaris had no thought of the past as she stood amongst the pillars of the colonnade which commemorate the great expedition; she was enthralled with the hour, the solitude, the silence, as she hesitated, wondering which way to go. Then, even as she hesitated, the silence was broken by the distant throbbing of a drum.

It came from one of the villages far down the hill and, caught by the evening breeze, was carried to the temple, to be multiplied a hundredfold in the echoing roof.

All other sounds may cease way out in the East; birds may nest and humans sleep; but the sound of the drum faileth never.

It is a message, a love-song, a lament, a prayer, and you hear it in the desert as in the jungle, in the temple as in the courtyard behind the hovel.

It is not a wise thing to listen to its call, for it can lead you off the beaten track, or over the precipice or out into the desert to die.

It caught the girl's feet in the witchery of its rhythm and set them moving upon the sand-covered floor of the Temple. Yet there was no smile on her lips as, moved by whatever it is that causes us to do strange things in the East, she danced like a wraith or a sylph, or a leaf in the wind, in and out of the columns and out into the light of the moon, and through the granite door onto the terrace where once had been planted the incense trees which had come with the spoil from Punt to perfume the air to the glory of Ra Hamarkhis.

The rolling of the drum stopped short, and Damaris came to herself with a start as she stood under the moon, then clasped her hands upon her thudding heart as she watched a man with two great shaggy dogs walk across the terrace towards her.

Save for the Mohammedan head-covering he was an Englishman, and he spoke in his mother's tongue to the girl he loved and whom he had watched since her arrival with the jostling, laughing crowd.

"The gods of the temple are good to me," he said simply. "I prayed that I might watch you dance upon the incense terrace of their house; they have answered my prayer. Come."

As they passed across the terrace to the hall of columns which is the vestibule of the chapel of the god of Death, he told her how he had watched and waited, meaning no discourtesy, until she should visit the temple amongst the limestone hills.

"Where are we going?"

Damaris spoke more to break the spell which seemed to hold her than to know the end of the walk across the sand. Bewitched by the moon and the terrific power of old Egypt, she would have followed the man blindly, fearing no hurt, even into the inner-most sanctuary which, hewn out of the rock itself, lies at the extreme end of the temple.

"To the Shrine of Anubis the god of Death, where I would show you the Hawk of Northern Egypt upon the wall."

They passed between the great columns and up the flight of steps to the doorway beyond which lie the chambers of the Shrine, and there Hugh Carden Ali took the girl's hand as he called her name aloud, until the walls or the spirits of the gods thundered back the echo.

"The gods introduced the kings of Egypt to the sanctuary. Anubis god of Death, as you will see by the painting upon the wall, led the great queen to the door," he said in reply to a whispered question from Damaris. "I would not that the shadow of death touched the hem of your raiment. I called your name aloud so that the gods might hear. . . . Do I believe in such strange things? How can one say, I believe, or do not believe, in this land which is in the grip of a dead past which is not dead?"

And they passed in through the door and stood looking up at the Hawk of Horus painted in the XVIII dynasty upon the wall.

Brilliant in colouring, green and white, with red-tipped wings, it spreads them above the place where once was seen the painted picture of the queen who reigned and suffered and died, thousands of years ago.

"Ah!" said Damaris, as she looked up to the corner. "It is your—your crest—your———"

"It is a fantasy of mine. We trace my father's house right back without a break to the days of the Pharaohs—so, I believe, does Mohammed Ali, vendor of slippers in the bazaar." He paused, then added abruptly, with a frown and a movement of the shoulders as though he were trying to shift a burden, "If you will come with me to the inner chamber, if you are not afraid, I will interpret the Story of the Hawk to you in the shadows where it belongs."

Damaris put out her hand as though to speak, then passed into the inner room, across the threshold of which the dogs of Billi laid themselves down.

"Death is around us," said Hugh Carden Ali. "Do you believe in omens?—No? Nor I. I wish there was a seat, so that you could rest whilst I tell you———"

Damaris laid her hand gently upon his arm, and he looked down into the face shining dead-white in the reflection of the moon which had silted in through a hole in the roof.

"You know?"

Damaris looked up and smiled.

"Yes! I know. And, being the son of such splendid people, I cannot understand why———"

The gates of pain and love and sacrifice were opened and the girl shrank back against the wall as the tide of pent-up bitterness swept around her in the ruined shrine. The man's face was white, his eyes blazed in the agony of his hurt, whilst the dogs lifted their heads and growled.

". . . You do not understand! You do not understand that I love you! And, loving you, I stand a prisoner behind the bars wrought for me by the love of my parents. That I love you as surely you never have been, never will be loved, and that I dare not, can not ask you to be my wife,—even if you loved me—which you do not. . . What? You do not see why I should not marry into my mother's race even as my father did? I will tell you why." He gripped her wrists and pulled her to him. "Because I am the outcome of their union. My father is an Arab, my mother an Englishwoman. I—I am a half-caste. I am nearer white, truly, than my father, but—but my son, although he might be white or dark,—a—a native, as you say in England—would only be a half-caste lying on your white breast, if you were my wife."

The moonbeams lengthened as the man talked on, whilst Damaris learned of one of love's bitterest mistakes.

"Oh, forgive me!" he ended. "Why did I bring you here to hurt you, to make you cry for a pain which is not yours? Why are you left alone? It is so dangerous in this land of my fathers. Your godmother deserts you whilst she goes to my mother, who is afraid for me—ah! did you not know? The man who loves you has left you to the wind of chance: my friend, Big Ben Kelham—O gods of ancient Egypt, how you must laugh!—my friend! Shall we meet again, I wonder?——"

Surely Anubis the god of death, Anubis the jackal-headed—who leads the soul of the departed through the underworld into the presence of the great Osiris—surely he moved upon the wall and turned to look after those two as they passed out of the inner chamber to stand beneath the Hawk upon the wall.

Or was it the shifting of the moon amongst the shadows?

"Will you"—there was no trace of the man's anguish in his voice: the Mohammedan's resignation to the inevitable may seem a weak way out to one who will kick and worry until he drops from exhaustion, but it saves a great deal of pain to others—"will you—you must surely marry some day, so beautiful, so sweet you are—will you let me give you this as a wedding-present, and will you think of me, a prisoner, when you fasten it in your wedding-gown?" He held out a jewel in the shape of the Hawk which spread its wings upon the wall above them. "It was found here, in this sanctuary—a priestly ornament? a pilgrim's offering? Who knows? Will you?—I have no right to it, for beneath my wings is the plumage of another race. I am not a pure-bred son of Northern Egypt."

"Will you pin it in?"

The girl's voice shook as she tilted back her chin so that her mouth was on a level with the man's as he bent to fasten the jewel in the silk.

"Will you promise me one thing? Yes!—you are good to the prisoner. Allah! how I love you, and surely, if I may not be your master I may serve you. If you should be in trouble—ever—in this land of Egypt, the very soil of which is drenched with the blood of those who have fought, and loved, and won, and lost thousands of years before the coming of the gentle prophet who said that in the sight of the great God, anyway, we are brethren—yes, if trouble should come to you, will you send me a messenger—to the Tents of Purple and of Gold? I am doing you a great wrong in lingering where I can catch glimpses of you. I love you—love you—but that is no excuse for causing you harm through the wagging of evil tongues."

Tears dropped one by one upon the jewel which glittered on her breast.

"And if I were in trouble—great trouble—if I were to come to you myself, how——?"

"My boat waits at the landing-stage from sundown to sunrise, the swiftest mare in all Egypt, as the fortune-teller foretold you, the snow-white mare Pi-Kay waits from the setting until the rising of the sun at the Gate of To-morrow, which is a ruined portal on the road of the Colossi. From there the way lies west. And fear not." He pointed to an inscription on the wall and translated it in the Egyptian tongue. "'I have come full of joy because of my love to thee; my hands are full of all life and purity. I am protecting thee among all gods.'"

Followed by the dogs, they walked slowly down the incline to a mound of rubbish flung up and left by an excavating party many years back; behind it they found the stallion Sooltan in the care of his sayis, also the one donkey which had wandered off in search of grass and got lost, and whose absence in the cavalcade had not been noticed on account of the disorder of the descent.

"Kismet!" had said Jobad the guide when he had made the discovery at the water's edge.

If the white folk could not keep count of themselves he was not going to draw their attention to the fact that one of the party was missing; he had not the slightest intention of providing an evening meal for the lion by offering to go in search of the pair. "Kismet!—Allah would watch over them!"

Hugh Carden Ali leapt to the saddle without touching the stirrups, then swung the girl as lightly as a leaf up into his arms.

Heedless of the extra burden of the slip of a girl who had mastered him in the desert and who lay so quietly against his master's heart, the magnificent black beast stood stock-still, then suddenly shivered violently, just as the dogs of Billi, belly to ground, eyes blazing, ruffs on end, growled softly.

Hugh Carden pressed Damaris back against his shoulder and turned and looked in the direction whence had come that sound, paralysing if you do not happen to be armed.

From somewhere amongst the rocky wilderness of the hills, carried by the night-breeze, had come the hoarse coughing of a lion.

"Listen," he said.

And as it came again, with shrieks of "Sabe! sabe!" the pea-green sayis leapt on the back of the terrified donkey, which, spurred by fear, disappeared like a streak down the hill just as the stallion, sweating with pure terror, reared and wheeled, then backed, with great eyes rolling and hoofs striking sparks from the stones.

Up he reared, until it seemed impossible that he should not fall backwards, crushing to death or hideously maiming the man who, encumbered with the girl upon his arm, could do little to calm the frightened beast, And well for them was it that Hugh Carden Ali, with his love and understanding of horses, knew that only to the sagacity of the animal could the safe negotiation of the dangerous descent down the hillside be left. He gave Sooltan his head.

There is no danger in it, goodness knows, when you bestride a diminutive donkey whose dainty little feet know every pebble on the route, but there is danger when an animal like Sooltan takes the Avenue of Sphinxes at a mad rush and slips and slithers and slides, under the impetus of his own weight, pace and terror, the rest of the way, even if he is as sure-footed as a goat.

* * * * * *

Later, when her beloved child wakened the night-porter, Jane Coop, blue with anxiety and cold, most unhygienically closed the window and thankfully padded off to her comfortable bed.



CHAPTER XXII

"_Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything! . . . . The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!"

LAMB.

In spite of her tongue, which was somewhat unduly inclined to gossip, Lady Thistleton was a motherly old soul and had a great affection for Damaris.

". . . I should not like either of my little girls," she was saying the morning after the visit to the Terrace Temple, "to visit the ruins or stay out unchaperoned after dark. I am responsible for you, you know, dear, and you are very beautiful and very young. Of course I know that you are a little unhappy, dear, but other girls have been the same. So you must not worry. Everything will come right. I expect you know all about my Ellen." Damaris nodded. "And everybody is so fond of you. Would you like to have a long day in bed to-day, dear, or go to Denderah with the girls? They are thinking of staying for a few days."

Damaris smiled the radiant smile which made her so attractive, and, rising, put her arms round the motherly old dear's neck and kissed her, which was an unusual thing for her to do, as she was, as a rule, undemonstrative to coldness.

"I'd love to go to Denderah, if I may take Janie and Wellington. And I'm truly not worrying; it's just a tremendous spirit of adventure which drives me to do these awful things."

So to Denderah she went, with her spirits at highest pitch at the thought of getting away from Luxor for a few days and of seeing the wonderful Temple of Hathor, the goddess of Joy and Youth.

She was in riotous spirits when she arrived at the Hotel Denderah in Kulla, where the lovely porous jugs come from; in fact, so blithe was she that Ellen, inclined to despondency and of a superstitious tendency, remarked:

"I should calm myself a little, my dear Damaris; such gaiety can only lead to depression, later on."

But Damaris only laughed.

How good it is that we cannot visualise beforehand the hour in which our tears must flow and our hearts come well-nigh to breaking!

She laughed, she sang, she visited the town, and went to bed early. She teased Jane Coop the next morning as, perilously perched on donkey-back, she headed the little procession which wended its way through the stretches of earth which later would give a harvest of corn and sweet-scented flowering bean.

She urged the panting bulldog along the three good miles, and laughed at him when, sneezing and coughing, he rubbed his great paws over his face, covered with the cobwebs which floated on the air; but she stopped laughing when she first caught sight of the great arch of crumbling antiquity which is all that is left of the edifice upon the site of which the Temple of Hathor was built; and she stood quite still in the over-powering colonnade, whilst the Thistletons, notebooks in hand, rushed inside in the wake of the guide. Jane Coop stopped dead at the outer edge of the colonnade.

"I thought you said it was a Temple of Love, dearie: all white marble, with doves and lovers'-knots and—and hearts. It's a tomb, that's what it is, and I'm going to sit outside. I don't like it; it bodes no good. Let's go back, dearie; I don't like the place or the hotel or the town. If we go quickly we can catch the first boat. Let the others stay if they want to. I'm thinking of you; my heart's telling me that you must not stop, and that if you do, harm'll come to you, or somebody."

Strange was the persistence of the usually placid woman, as she caught her young mistress by the arm and quite violently shook her fist at the sinister face of the goddess which shows on each side of the columns.

And strange it is to know that if the girl had but listened, the harm might not have befallen.

But Damaris shook her head.

"We must be polite, Janie dear, even if we are dying to go home. Besides, two or three days will do us good, and it will help pass the time until Marraine comes back. Come, Well-Well."

The dog followed his mistress up to the door, but there he stopped.

"Come along, Well-Well," she repeated.

The dog sat down, with a definite air of ending further exploration as far as ruins were concerned, on his part.

"I think you and Janie are bewitched to-day."

Damaris spoke petulantly and watched the dog waddle back and sit down beside the maid, who, busy crocheting, sat on a stone some few yards from the Temple, to which she had resolutely turned her back.

Damaris stood for a moment feeling as though the very wettest of wet blankets had been wrapped round her; then turned, listened until she heard Ellen's staccato voice coming from the direction of the antechamber in the middle of the Temple, and tiptoed across to the east side, where are to be found the ruined Treasury and Store Rooms in which were stored the incense for sacrifice or offering, the vestments and banners and other such props needful to the correct fulfilment of the rites of an ancient worship which, as far as services go, in display of wealth and sense-stirring accessories, did not differ so very much from what we see in some of our churches in this present day of grace.

She came to the stairs, up which so many years ago the mother of Hugh Carden Ali had climbed, on the day when she had fully realised that the crown of love had come to her.

Damaris climbed them, and stood on the roof, watching, as had watched Jill Carden, the clouds of twittering birds as they flew in the direction of the Libyan Hills; then she crossed to the little shrine of Osiris, stood for a moment unconsciously passing her finger over the carvings, turned as though someone had called her, and ran down the stairs.

She stood and listened until she heard Ellen's voice looming from the side chapel on the western side, then, and just as though pulled by some invisible hand, she passed quietly through the antechamber into the sanctuary where, in the days of Ancient Egypt, the mighty Pharaoh, and he only, entered to commune with the gods at the birth of the new year; and where the mother of Hugh Carden Ali, stricken with the glory of the secret revealed, had fallen unconscious to the ground, over twenty years ago.

She stood quite still, her heart beating to suffocation; then she raised her hand and pushed the hair from her forehead.

"I feel just as though the roof was pressing down upon me," she whispered to herself. "As though, through me, something awful was going to happen. I——"

She turned, and almost ran out of the sanctuary, her footsteps waking the echoes of the roof which once had resounded to the clash of cymbal, the roll of drum and blare of trumpets. She heard Ellen's strident voice calling to her, telling her to come and join them in the crypts; she paid no heed, she ran on and out into the sunshine and down to the maid, who was still placidly crocheting.

And as she left the ruin, the mantle of depression fell from her, and she laughed as she caught the great dog and forced him to walk upon his hind-legs.

"No, Janie," she said that night, as the maid tucked her up in bed. "Here I stay until I have visited the Temple thoroughly, and I'll take you down into the creepy crypts and lock you in them if you worry any more. We all got up too early and hadn't had enough breakfast—that is why we disliked the place so much."

They stayed some days, and then took the public steamer home, Damaris bubbling over with high infectious spirits, which had their birth in a secret hope that she might find a letter from Ben Kelham upon her return.

She was leaning over the rail, thinking about him, as the boat made its lazy way down-stream.

"So funny," she was saying to herself as they approached Luxor under a sunset sky. "I wonder if he will be at the hotel. I somehow feel him quite near."

And then her thoughts were distracted by the exclamations and laughter of the passengers as they rushed to the side, causing the boat to take a distinct list.

What little things serve to amuse us!

The bluebottle at the Cathedral service; the stray dog which rushes athwart the regal procession; the straw hat blown through the traffic!

The steamer was churning up the waters of the river down which Cleopatra had passed in all her power and beauty; on each side were the ruins of temples and tombs built to the glory of great god or mighty emperor; yet the tourists flung down guide-books and left their tea to shout encouragement and wave their handkerchiefs to Ben Kelham and Sybil Sidmouth, who were also having tea on the slanting deck of their private steamer, which had run aground on the pestiferous sand-bank.

Mrs. Sidmouth, in the seclusion of the saloon, was summoning all her strength for a real nerve-storm.

Damaris looked hard for a moment, then became deadly-white, and backed her way out through the crowd. She flashed a quick glance round in search of the Thistletons, and saw them leaning dangerously far over the rail, trying to attract the attention of Sybil Sidmouth, who was smiling so contentedly as she handed her companion his tea; then she turned to run to the saloon to hide herself, and ran, instead, right into Jane Coop's arms.

There was a grim set to the maid's mouth and a steely glitter in her eyes.

"I was just coming to ask you, dearie, if you'd like a cup of tea. One gets fair sick of the ruins and things one sees on this river. The young ladies can come and find you at tea if they want to."

How often had the motherly woman gone out to bring in the lamb from the storm, or hunted the fields and hedgerows for her straying chick!

Later, she sat on the edge of her darling's bed and patted the curly head resting on her faithful heart, to the accompaniment of little clucking sounds.

"There now, dearie—there now—there now! It isn't worth crying over; every river is as full of good fish as ever sailed on it in a boat that couldn't run straight. Let old Nannie dry her baby's tears. There how—there now!"

She dried the tear-stained little face with a big handkerchief, and rocked her child to the rhythm of the music which drifted from the hall, borne by the night breeze, through the open window, until the sobs had ceased.

And in the ball-room the Thistleton family nodded their heads sagely to the rhythm of the same music.

"I am sure she didn't see Mr. Kelham and Sybil, Mamma," Ellen was saying. "She was having tea when we went to find her, and looked quite all right."

"I was thankful when I saw her," broke in Berenice, patting a thick envelope with the Edinburgh post-mark. "On the Nile, together, it really did not seem comme il faut at all, and wherever Mrs. Sidmouth was, she might have countenanced the—er—the courtship by her presence on deck."

"Well, all's well that ends well," said Mamma placidly, as she secretly returned thanks that her daughters were not as others.

* * * * * *

But later, far into the night, Damaris stood at her window, with her arms round the bulldog's neck.

"You're the only one who really loves me, Well-Well. Everybody else run away and leaves me. I'm—I'm, so unhappy!"

Tears stood in the big eyes as she flung out her arms and cried in a sudden passionate intensity, "Marraine! Marraine! I want you—I want you! If you loved me, you would come to me, because I want you so!"



CHAPTER XXIII

"The thorns which I have reap'd are of the tree I planted; they have torn me, and I bleed. I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed."

BYRON.

Olivia Duchess of Longacres stood on the balcony of the hotel, looking down at the cortege which had escorted the wife of the Sheik el-Umbar from the House 'an Mahabbah some way out in the desert and which was making its way as best it could through the tortuous, narrow, unpaved streets of Khargegh town.

The white and only wife of the great Arab travelled en reine; two outriders with modern rifles slung across the shoulder and brandishing throwing-spears, caused consternation amongst the spectators as at a word or touch of the unspurred foot they made their magnificent horses rear and back and plunge.

One trick or feat had caused the heavens to be rent with screams of pure joy and shouts of "Wallahi-el-azim," "Ma sha-Allah" and other references to the might and glory of the Almighty.

You do not often see this feat of strength and dexterity, and when you do, it brings your heart almost out of your body and has an exhibition of tent-pegging simply beaten to a frazzle.

A spectator of the tender age of three, clothed—as it was a day of festival—in tarbusch and voluminous robe girt about him with a cummerbund—on ordinary days he would have been clothed in nature and girt in dirt—toddled straight into the middle of a square, just as the outriders charged across it. There was no room for them to turn, so packed were the places where the sidewalks should have been, neither was there time in which to rein in their horses. Women shrieked and beat their breasts, men looked on at the inevitable tragedy with the composure of the sterner sex.

The babe stood stock-still.

And Yussuf the outrider, bending low on his saddle, drove straight down upon it, gathered the back part of the cummerbund and some folds of the voluminous skirt upon the point of his spear, and, lifting the mite, amidst yells and shouts and wild clamour, carried him at spear-length and top speed safely across the square.

Where the real danger comes in is in judging the exact amount of stuff to gather on the spear-head; an inch or so too much and you may get a part of the kiddie's little back; an inch or so too little and, when you have him high in air, you may cut through the cloth and cause said kiddie to make a hasty descent to terra firma.

Anyway, the child was safely restored to its fond mother, who simultaneously smacked it and stuffed its mouth with fly-blown sweetmeats, and became the hero for the latter part of the day.

The real cortege was headed by camels bearing gifts from the House el-Umbar to the great white woman who stood, on the balcony in a grey silk taffeta dress, a shawl of priceless lace on her head and a grey parrot upon her shoulder. Silks, jewels, sweetmeats, bibelots in ivory and precious metal, dates, coffee in berries, a monkey and a bushel of wheat were amongst the gifts carried by the camels who grumbled and rumbled as they stalked with swaying gait and contemptuous half-closed eyes.

Next came the armed escort, mounted on horses, with modern rifles slung and cummerbunds stuck full of the most atrocious-looking knives. They scowled at everyone, but as they passed under the balcony each one drew his knife and rattled it against that of his neighbour so that the weapons made a glittering arch in the light of the setting sun, as salutation to the old white woman who was of their mistress's race.

Came Mustapha, the Ethiopian, into whose care the Sheikh had given his wife all those years ago, when they had ridden out of the desert up to his dwelling amongst the talik palms of the Flat Oasis.

He was on foot—not that he had done the entire journey in like manner—and held the golden chain of the magnificent camel upon which his mistress rode.

She rode in a palanquin of ivory with curtains of rose satin embroidered in precious stones; on either side, also on camels, rode two slaves who waved huge circular fans on long staffs to cool the air about this woman who was so beloved throughout the land for her good deeds and loving, helping hand.

She was in silk robes of rose covered in a satin cloak of deeper shade; she was closely veiled as becomes the wife of a Mohammedan, and wore no jewels save a rope of pearls; and her steady, wonderful blue eyes, which were just twin heavens of happiness, shone with delight as she looked up at the old woman who had known her as a girl, with her hair hanging in two great plaits.

She put both hands to her forehead and spread them out in the beautiful Eastern gesture of welcome, then bowed to her knees, as she passed.

Then, turning, she pulled her yashmak a little to one side. "Petite Maman!" she cried. "Welcome, Petite Maman!" and blew her a kiss from the tips of her rosy fingers.

Arrived at the entrance, the armed escort made a circle round her with drawn knives; her camel knelt; a Persian carpet was laid across the quasi-clean stones; then Mustapha the Ethiopian made a sign, upon which Ameena, the little hunchback woman who loved her mistress more than her life and who had been transported with joy when she had laid the first-born, the son, in the mother's arms, came running swiftly.

Mustapha and Ameena lived one long life of secret feud; they fought like cat and dog as to who could do the most in their mistress's service; they stood shoulder to shoulder and fought everybody else in the same good cause; and the huge man scowled fiercely as the deformed little woman arranged the flowing robes and walked up the Persian carpet behind the wife of the great Sheikh.

"Well, I never!" was Hobson's comment as she peeked from behind a door. "Her grace must have made a mistake. You take that downstairs," she added, coming boldly out onto the landing to intercept the slave with the monkey. "Downstairs," and she pointed down to the entrance, surging with people, "unless you want the place to be full of feathers and fur!"

Jill stood in the doorway; looked across at her godmother, and made the beautiful gesture of salutation, then removed her veil, picked up her robes and ran across the room right into the outstretched arms.

Tears were very close as they laughed and held each other by the hand, but the laughter died away altogether as they sat in the falling shadows, the younger one with her head on the older one's lap.

Two wise women, they were fighting for the happiness of the young, as the shadows fell and the stars came out and faded before the light of the moon as she trailed her silver garments across the heavens.

Jill had risen once to her feet, in a moment of anger, and had gone out onto the balcony and stood looking down, smiling upon the crowd, composed chiefly of women, who had raised their hands and called down the blessings of Allah upon her.

The steps were strewn with gifts, ranging from live goats to masses of sticky sweetmeats and glass beads. Mothers had brought their sickly babies and laid them down amongst the goats and beads, hoping that if even the shadow of the blessed woman were to fall upon them they might be healed.

Mustapha kept guard, hurling abuse at those who tarried, helping their departure by the aid of his foot. Hobson stood like a grim sentinel outside the sitting-room door. She had made tea under the greatest difficulty—the kettle of tepid water had been flung at the salaaming offender who had brought it—and had taken it in blushing brick-red when Jill had risen and kissed her on both cheeks. Dinner had been served, hardly tasted, and been sent away, and a whole tray of cups full of burnt milk showed the perturbation of the maid's mind as she waited, and waited for the sound of the little bell which summoned her to her grace's presence.

"You are a noble-looking woman, my child," said the duchess, as she keenly scrutinised the fair face with great blue eyes and broad humourous mouth, which, but for an added serenity and dignity, was so very like the face of the girl who had been left behind at Ismailiah over twenty years ago, and who had journeyed into the desert with the Arabian Sheikh and had married him. "I'm not surprised your husband adores you. Could he not have come with you? I have always longed to see him."

It seemed that the Sheikh Hahmed had been invited to Bagdad, to some conference concerning the big Arabian question, but hoped to be able to greet her grace before her departure. In the meanwhile his dwellings, his servants, his horses and everything he was possessed of were hers.

"And he means it, Petite Maman; he loves making people happy. I—I love him." She paused for a moment; then looked straight into the stern old eyes. "My love for my son is as great as my love for his father, and I would lay down my life for their happiness."

There was no tenderness in the sad old eyes and no lines of yielding in the stern old mouth; for although her heart was aching to say yes to the mother's insistent demands for her son's happiness, her common sense had turned her into a very rock of resistance.

"I am happy, radiantly happy." Jill, who was sitting on a stool at the old woman's feet, slipped to her knees and caught the wrinkled old hands in her own. "So why should the little girl not be happy with my son, who is the finest man and dearest son ever born to woman? Tell me what difference is there? Why should my son be made unhappy? Tell me!"

She knew perfectly well. Her son's words on the roof of his dwelling under the stars were ringing in her ears; but she was hanging on to a very forlorn hope with both hands, tricking herself with the thought that, out of her love for her, the wise old woman might see things in a different light and give her consent to the marriage just because the man was her son.

But the old woman caught the mother to her breast and stroked the golden head and kissed it with a world of pain in her sad old eyes.

"Because, dear," and the words were very gentle and the voice was very soft, "just because, when we love, we think of ourselves only, and not of those to come."

The old woman sighed as Jill raised her head sharply: "Try to understand, little one. You, my dear, a white woman, married a pure-bred Arab. Ah! my, dear, my dear, forgive me, your son is———"

Jill sprang to her feet, and as she sprang caught the rope of pearls upon the arm of the chair, breaking it and scattering the jewels to the four corners of the room.

She flung out her hands, making the Eastern sign to scare away evil spirits. "The omen!" she whispered. "The omen! A broken string of pearls means—means—death."

"Come, come, child," said the old lady sharply, and to allay the unsightly terror in the other's face, and also because she believed in using an axe in felling a tree, repeated her last remark. "You are suffering now through the selfishness of love. Women who marry without giving a thought to the result of the marriage, to the good or the harm it might bring to the children of that marriage, deserve to suffer. Marry the man, if you really love him and can help him by being his wife; but let there be no children if there is anything in the union that might hurt them." She rose and crossed to the girl who was standing staring into a corner of the room, with a world of horror in her eyes. She moved back as the old woman, came towards her, holding out her hands as though to ward off some evil thing she saw in the shadows.

"I can't bear it," she whispered; "I can't bear it. I don't believe that anyone, could think that of Hugh. Remember how loved he was at Harrow———"

"Ah! my dear, my dear, there was your great mistake . . ."

"You're wrong," interrupted Jill harshly. "You're hopelessly, cruelly wrong. He was idolised in England; he is loved out here. It was sheer spite on the part of the—woman who told him that he was—was——" She pressed her hands over her mouth as she backed to the wall, then flung her arms out wide; her face was dead-white, her eyes blazing; she reminded the old woman of a tigress fighting for her cubs; she was beautiful beyond words in the tragedy of her motherhood. "I don't believe you—I don't believe you—I—you———"

"Listen, Jill." The old woman's voice was as cold as ice as she watched the agony in the fair face. Dear heavens! she did not want to hurt; she wanted to give in and gather the child up in her arms, but she knew what was best. "Your boy knows it, dear; he knows he is out of the running. Come over to me and listen whilst I tell you something." She sat down and pulled the suffering child down beside her, who lay across the silken knees like the stricken mother across the knees of the wise Madonna and made no sound or movement whilst she listened to the bitter words of the fortune-teller in the hotel garden at Cairo.

A little silence fell; then, very gently, very tenderly the old woman spoke:

"So you see, dear, until she is of age it will be only my duty to see that Damaris does not marry your son."

And Jill sprang to her feet and beat her hands together.

"And I," she said, "I will give my heart's blood to bring happiness to my son. Death alone shall———"

She stopped and shivered as she glanced over her shoulder out into the night, then drew herself up with a surpassing dignity and threw out her hands in the Eastern gesture of resignation.

"You say 'I will not,' I say 'I will,' but it is God who decides." With a little sobbing sigh she relinquished the unequal struggle, just as Hobson walked boldly into the room and stood inside the door, like a graven image of intense displeasure, when her mistress, unable to withstand the unspoken disapproval, consented, after a promise to Jill to have another long talk on the morrow, to go to bed.

But there was to be no long talk anyway in the town of Khargegh on the morrow.

She lay in bed, propped by pillows against which, divested of its mask of red and white and blue, the dear little old face shone brown. A priceless bit of lace hid her own white locks, free for the night of the outrageous perruque which covered them by day and which lay at the moment hidden in its box.

A pair of crimson bed-slippers peeped from under the bed, another pair, absurdly small, outrageously high-heeled, buckled and crimson, made a splash of colour near the dressing-table. Her little hands were gently folded under the ruffles of priceless lace of her cashmere night-attire as she lay quite still, trying to find a way out through the jungle of pain and grief which seemed to spread round and about so many she loved; whilst Dekko, puffed out with sleepiness, sat on the back of a chair, muttering incoherently to some fanciful image of his weird brain.

Hobson lay fast asleep in the next room, which had a communicating door with that of her mistress. Knowing nothing of nerves or of temperament, she had dropped asleep as soon as her head, with scanty locks tortured into a chevaux-de-frise of steel pins, had touched the pillow; her strong hands were clenched on the frill of her stout calico nightdress; her powerful face looked grim in the dim light of the moon, which, high in the heavens, flung a silver shaft through the open window straight across the bed. There was absolutely no sound when, just as, so many miles away, Damaris made her passionate appeal, as she stood by the window, Hobson, dour, stolid, unimaginative, yet with a streak of Scotch blood in her veins, sat straight up in bed. Her eyes were wide open as she stared in front of her, then she passed her powerful hand over her grim face and flung the bedclothes to one side.

"She's in trouble." She spoke very clearly, sat for a moment thinking, then reached for a puce dressing-gown trimmed mulberry. "I'll go and tell her," and the infinite love in the pronoun was good to hear. "She'll understand."

The duchess turned: her head as the door opened slowly, but made no movement, although her heart suddenly quickened its beat.

"Yes?" she said quietly.

Hobson walked up to the bed and took one of the little old hands between her own powerful ones.

"Miss Damaris wants you, ma'am." She spoke with certain conviction; then added, "I've had a dream, ma'am. I saw nothing, but I heard Miss Damaris calling you. It woke me up. 'Marraine,' she said, 'I want you.' That was all. And she does, ma'am."

She stood patting the hand of her mistress, who lay for a moment quite still; then the faithful creature put a Shetland shawl round the bent shoulders as the old lady sat straight up in bed.

"Would you please find Miss Jill's maid," (she used the term of the past, when Jill Carden had stayed at the Castle and had teased Hobson to death) "and ask her to tell her mistress that I should be pleased if she could find it convenient to come to my room for a moment."

Hobson found the aged body-servant lying asleep outside her mistress's door.

Ameena had learned a few words of the English language in the last twenty years, but not enough to allow her to understand the terrifying person who stood over her; so that she shook her head whilst Hobson repeated her request over and over again, and ever more distinctly, until it ended at last in a veritable shout which brought Jill, who had not slept for the ache in her mother-heart, to the door.

For a moment she stood, a beautiful picture, with big questioning eyes and two great plaits of auburn hair hanging down over her satin wrap; then she ran down the corridor and into her godmother's bedroom.

In an hour those two forceful women had made their plans, acting without hesitation upon what might so easily have been the outcome of digestive trouble on Maria Hobson's part.

Fully clothed, the two maids entered her grace's bedroom, the one carrying the tea-tray and the other a plate of biscuits.

"Ameena," said Jill, who was sitting on the end of the bed, "please go and find Mustapha. Tell him to go to the station, find the station-master and give him this letter. We want a special train as soon as possible. Mustapha is to bring me a written reply from the station-master."

She spoke with the authority of the Eastern potentate and took no notice of the maid when she knelt and kissed the hem of her satin wrap.

"Give me a cigarette, Hobson," said her grace, in the depths of whose eyes twinkled the star of humour. "We shall be starting as soon as possible, maybe directly after breakfast, for Luxor."

"Yes, your grace. I will begin the packing," said the imperturbable Hobson, placing the tray on the table beside the bed. "And when you have had your tea, ma'am, will you try and get a little sleep? You can leave everything safely to me."

But special trains do not grow like blackberries upon a side line in the East, so that many weary hours passed before they set out upon the return journey, which was rendered infinitely tedious by the never-ending mistakes which got them shunted into sidings to allow the ordinary trains to pass.



CHAPTER XXIV

"The watchmen that went about the city found me; they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the wall took away my veil from me."

SONG OF SOLOMON.

The night before Ben Kelham's return to Cairo, Zulannah sat on a pile of cushions, with her back to the crumbling plaster wall, in the filthy, smoke-filled hovel.

She had completely recovered, and save for the excruciating pain caused by the shrunken muscles when she moved, was as sound as a bell, and likely to live to a ripe old age, slave to her whilom servant, who sat on his heels, inhaling the fumes of the jewel-encrusted nargileh which his heart had always coveted.

It is useless writing about the hell through which the woman had lived from the moment she had returned to consciousness. Besides, there are some things which words cannot describe, and which in any case are best left alone, not even to the imagination.

She was absolutely in the power of the negroid brute. With the destruction of her beauty she had lost everything save what she had in the bank, and from the ever-growing heaps of little canvas bags in a corner and little piles of banknotes under the straw, she knew that some day that, too, must come to an end.

She had loved her jewels, loved the shimmering pearls and sparkling diamonds, and had found her greatest joy in dipping her hand into a leather bag filled with unset stones. How often had she sat in the luxury of her bedroom, revelling in the trickle of the rubies, sapphires and emeralds from between her fingers into her lap.

Even those she had lost.

The Milner safe stood open, showing empty shelves, and she shuddered yet at the memory of the frightful scene which had followed her refusal to open it.

She loved jewels; wanted them for their beauty; had fought the negro for them; but there was one thing she clung to even more, and that was life, so that when the huge hands had slowly, so very slowly pressed upon her neck, she had given in and setting the combination, had swung the door slowly back.

And Qatim, grey-green with fright, thinking that it had been worked by the power of a djinn or devil, had flung her out into the night, and having scraped a hole in the foetid earth under the straw, with fervent prayers to whatever he worshipped, had withdrawn the jewels, hidden them, and called the woman back.

Yes! she clung to life. Strange is it how we do, even when youth and beauty and health have passed from us. How, crippled and unlovely, twisted of temper or limb, with failing senses, in bath-chair, or propped on sticks, we hang on to the last thread, when surely we ought to be so thankful to snap it and be away to whatever our lives here have prepared for us over the border.

"Were't not a shame, were't not a loss for him In this clay carcase, crippled, to abide?"

Well might old Omar ponder upon this.

But Zulannah had a good reason for clinging to life, in spite of the greatness of her debacle.

The metal of which had been wrought the one love that had come to her in her short life had not been able to withstand the crucible of physical pain. For hours and days she had writhed in the agony of her physical injury, with no one to care if she suffered or starved, except the Ethiopian, who, when her senses had come back to her, had twitted her upon her failure in her love-affairs; had tormented and mocked and laughed, until a great wish for revenge had taken the place of her former love for the Englishman. Revenge, above all things, on the girl who had been capable of inspiring love in two such men; revenge on the white man who had really been the primary cause of her downfall, but a lingering, hellish revenge, if she could only think of one, for the man who had given the order to the dogs just because she had reviled the white girl, Damaris.

So she sat on the pile of cushions, smoking the cheapest cigarette of the bazaar, whilst her cunning brain wove plots around the astounding news Qatim had just imparted.

They were perfectly free from interruption. The door was barred and the small aperture which served as window was too highly placed in the wall to allow of eyes to peep; but it was superstition that really kept them safe and proved far more potent as a barrier against their neighbours' curiosity than any spike-crowned wall.

Qatim had given out that the woman was bewitched, and that death, instantaneous and horrible, would be the fate awaiting anyone but himself who should speak to her or look upon her unveiled face before the setting of the sun—some of us Christians refuse to walk under ladders—and, although it entailed much fetching and carrying and marketing on his part, still, it ensured them solitude.

"And you saw him?"

She spoke with a sibilant intaking of breath, caused by the twist to her mouth.

"Yes; with a beautiful white woman—another. They have come from Assouan by the boat."

"Not the girl who rode in the desert with———"

She touched the purple angry marks on her cheek.

"Nay, woman; I have told thee, she walks in the blackness of the ruins, with the man who caused thee thy hurt. She drives with him," he spat, "she should take thy place in the bazaar, O Zulannah of the thousand lovers."

The woman paid no heed to the jibe.

"Who told thee?"

"Behold, the night-watchman of the big hotel upon the edge of the water sent me word."

"Why?"

"That is no business of thine. Tell me what scheme thou hast in thy head. Dost desire the death of the three?"

Zulannah shook her head and turning it so that the wounds and distortion were hidden, leant against the wall.

"Not yet!" she said, loosening with filthy hand the uncombed masses of jet-black hair, which still retained something of the perfume of better days. "Not yet! Let me think awhile."

And she paid no heed to the man, who sat staring at her, breathing heavily.

The right side of her face, untouched and perfect, showed in all its beauty against the dirty whiteness of the wall; her hair served as a mantle to the perfect figure in the soiled satin wrap; her crippled limbs showed not at all in the foul room lit by a wick floating in a saucer of oil.

The light went out suddenly.

Oh, Zulannah! surely your cap of misery was full to the brim!



CHAPTER XXV

"He that has patience may compass anything."

RABELAIS.

Ben Kelham sat near the balustrade on the verandah of Shepheard's Hotel just after breakfast, pretending to read the morning paper, whilst trying to make up his mind.

Sybil Sidmouth and her mother, owing to lack of accommodation, brought about by the crush of visitors in the huge caravanserai, had gone to the Savoy; for which the man was secretly thankful.

He wanted to eat out his heart all by himself in the appalling loneliness which had overwhelmed him when, on ringing up Heliopolis the night before, he had learned that Damaris and the duchess had transferred themselves to Luxor.

And you simply cannot indulge in your particular brand of malaise or dolour with an extreme optimist sitting opposite you at meals, or adjacent to your elbow at most other times.

He anathematised the postal system of Egypt; his own haste in accepting the girl's refusal; the oriental imagination which magnified cats into lions; but, above all, the wash of that steamer (upon which Damaris had returned from Denderah) which had re-floated his own craft and sent him racing full steam ahead for Cairo.

Another hour of the infernal wait on the sandbank, and he would have transferred himself to one of the scores of small boats and been ferried across to Luxor, where he would have dined at the Winter Palace Hotel, whilst waiting to catch the express to Cairo, and perhaps have seen his beloved in the dining-room, or have heard that she was staying there.

He was thoroughly irritated as he pondered in his deliberate way as to the best thing to do.

Should he take the first train back to Luxor, or, as the duchess had not seen fit to acquaint him as to her movements, should he stay where he was, write her a letter, or send a telegram and wait for an answer? Anyway, he was irritated enough to scowl at the commissionaire who was rating a woman whom he had seen hanging about the street, doubtless with intent of soliciting a nickel coin from one of the great white race as he—or she—descended the steps to stroll along the street.

She made a few choice remarks upon the undoubted inclusion of a pig in the commissionaire's parentage, in a curiously sibilant voice, then limped away with a distressing swing of her body from the hips.

"Can't you keep those people quiet?" Kelham demanded angrily, as he moved a chair further back, and lit a cigarette.

An hour had passed, in which he had come to no decision, when Fate, in the shape of a page-boy, offered him the just-arrived, local morning paper, which he took and read, with only half a mind upon the gossipy contents.

"By Jove!" he suddenly exclaimed. "If that isn't a bit of luck! Here's the very excuse for getting down there without kind of thrusting myself upon them." He flattened out the paper and again read through the paragraph which gave a most extraordinarily detailed account of the immensely wealthy Hugh Carden Ali, his career at Harrow; his travels; his stables in the desert; his birds and a hundred and one other details calculated to interest those who like reading about other people's most intimate affairs. It ended: ". . . Being a great sportsman, the strange story of lion which is causing such uneasiness and is likely to do harm to the Luxor season, has taken him to his Tents of Purple and Gold, one of the wonders of modern Egypt and which lie in the desert a little distance from the well-known Colossi."

He did not frown this time as he folded the paper and turned to watch the commissionaire in conclave with a coal-black Ethiopian who, clad in crimson tunic, enormous turban and with scimitar rattling at his side, tendered an envelope.

"Yes, yes," said the hotel servant. "I will see that it is delivered into the gentleman's own hands. And, tell me"—he lowered his voice as he winked his eye—"has she returned from Alexandria?"

Qatim was caught in a quandary, and he cursed the vanity which had urged him to don his most resplendent garments upon his errand to the great hotel, to which he had come after a violent argument with Zulannah.

With a heart full of hatred, and agony in her twisted limbs the woman had hung about the streets in front of the hotel until she had seen the man for whom she had felt such a sudden and fleeting love, and who was the primary cause of her disfigurement.

Hurt him she must, if only as a balm to her own physical and mental agony; and in what better way than by destroying his faith in the white girl he loved?

Hence the letter, written hastily in the hovel and consigned to the care of the Ethiopian, who, in return for his assistance, had demanded backshisch in the shape of a pink leaf covered with strange black marks.

The woman's presence in the great city in her deplorable state was the last thing he wanted to be known; so he lied—clumsily.

"Nay; she is in Alexandria," he blurted out.

The commissionaire slowly winked an eye.

"Perhaps," he said; "perhaps not," and chuckled as the negro turned hastily and strode away in the direction of the bank.

And thus came it to be known in the bazaar that Zulannah the courtesan had returned to the great city.

And a little later, Ben Kelham felt no tweak at the string with which Fate had hobbled him to his destiny, when, on hearing his number called, he took the letter from the page-boy, turned it over, and looked at it on each side, as we do when curious, but not over-interested; then he opened it idly, read it and crushed it in both hands.

It was written in the execrable English Zulannah had picked up in her few years of cosmopolitan intercourse with different nationalities; it was in vile hand-writing and was as despicable a method of revenge as an anonymous letter usually is.

It ran after this fashion:

"If you want to find your white woman go and look for her in the ruins of Karnak, at night, in the arms of her half-caste lover, Hugh Carden Ali."

And the woman who had limped back to the street, sniggered behind her veil as she watched the man tear the letter into shreds, while he sat and thought out an answer to this second problem.

"It's a damnable lie. My Damaris and good old Carden! I expect they've met, but who———" He sniffed at his hands suddenly. "Pah! Now, where have I smelt that scent before?—filth!" He sat with his hands to his nose, then frowned as, under the suggestion of the perfume, the picture of a lovely woman clad in silks and satins and wearing rich jewels rose before him.

"My God!" he said slowly, as the full significance of it all dawned slowly upon him. "Of course! She—she invited me to—to visit her—and I refused. By all that's clean and decent, if I don't make her pay for this! And it's Carden, too, who can tell me the best way to set about it. The harlot! I wonder if I shall have to wait until evening for a train." He clenched his hands until the knuckles showed white, as he unseeingly watched a woman limp down the street. "I'll make her sorry she was ever born."

He need not have worried on that point. Fate was dogging those unsteady feet back to the hovel.

The spreading of a prairie fire is slow compared to the speed with which news runs through the bazaar. The servants in the big house in the big garden went sullenly about their various tasks of tidying and clearing up the courtesan's home, whilst little knots of people, composed principally of women, stood about in the vicinity of the gate.

It was the first time the tyrannical woman had been absent upon a long journey, and the relatives and friends even unto a most distant generation of her servants had taken advantage of it to visit the house and examine its, to them, surpassing luxury.

The Ethiopian, with his mind fixed only upon the bank, had taken but little interest in the house itself, and had visited it but rarely, and then only for the sake of appearances; so that the visitors had become more and more brazen, as the days passed, fingering the satins, sitting upon the cushions, feasting on the floor.

Bes, the monstrous keeper of the lions, had become prime favourite with the men, and the neighbourhood had resounded with the roars of the brutes at night as they fought for their food.

Also was there something savage in the way the women visitors had fingered and touched everything, and had visited every corner of the building. They were fat or thin, plain or passably good-looking; they were all hideously poor, and in their heads they had the echo of the gibes their menfolk had cast at them, when, returning with empty pockets, they had boasted of great conquests.

Which boasting the sillies had believed, thinking, as all women think, that their own particular male has been specially favoured of the gods and is therefore an Adonis in the eyes of every other woman.

There was an indefinite air of trouble in that quarter of the bazaar which increased with the heat of the day. Household matters were neglected, whilst the women foregathered to talk; words were few, but gestures were quick and expressive; the servants, wondering at the absence of the Ethiopian, grumbled as they worked; they had been paid no wages in their mistress's absence, and were on the verge of mutiny.

Brave words! When they knew that they would fall flat upon their faces at the first swish of her satin robes.