smelling
streets of the city, with their noise and the crowding of human and
animal beasts of burden.

As Freddy approached Michael Amory a look of satisfaction spread over
his face. "Mike," as he called him, was so busily engrossed in his
work that he did not look up. He was making a delicate and
extraordinarily exact reproduction on paper of a figure of an Egyptian
King making offerings to an enthroned Osiris. No other artist had ever
done the same work with his delicacy of touch and exactness of detail.
The picture on his easel looked as if he had cut a square block out of
the polished limestone which held the tinted relief of the King making
the offering to the god, and set it upon his easel.

Freddy was proud of Michael and not a little surprised at the rapidity
with which he had grasped the nature of his excavation work, which was
not only the opening up of fresh monuments for the pleasure of the
public, but the search after missing links and the verifying of
well-founded conjectures. He knew that Michael had read a fair amount
of Egyptian history, that he had specialized in one period, and that he
had studied, in his own fashion, something of the mythology of ancient
Egypt, but he was quite unprepared for the "sense" of the more serious
part of the work which he had shown.

Besides which, Freddy knew more than Michael thought he did of the new
distraction which had disturbed his mind.

About once in ten days Freddy found it almost necessary to go to Assuan
or Luxor and there throw himself heart and soul into the festivities of
the foreign hotel society. For one night and half a day he played
tennis and danced and was young again. These periodical outings and
his private hobbies kept his mind and nerves well balanced. At his age
it was scarcely healthy for a sport-loving, normal Englishman to spend
his days and nights all alone, in the silent valley in the hills, his
only companions the mummies of Pharaohs and the bones unearthed from
subterranean tombs. But Freddy slept as happily and as soundly with
mummies in his room and ancient skulls below his bed as he did in the
modern, conventional bedroom of the big hotel at Assuan.

Michael had accompanied him to these dances, and Freddy had noticed
that on each occasion he was very much engrossed by the company of an
Englishwoman of whom he had heard a good deal that was ugly and
unpleasant. He had long ago ceased to pay any attention to the
scandals whi