instead of seeking company better fit to entertain him.
There were young women in Cairo who had been much more conventionally
educated than she--young women who had mingled in society in Chicago,
and in eastern cities. A few of them had even traveled in Europe--a
thing very rare among Americans, and especially among Western Americans
in the sixties. These young women knew all about operas and theaters.
They had heard great musicians play and great singers sing. They had
seen all the notable actors. They read the current literature of the
time--the lighter part of it at least--and above all, they were
mistresses of the "patter," which passes for brilliancy and sometimes
even for wit in fashionable life.

Guilford Duncan visited none of these, and Barbara could not understand.

"He is too tired, I suppose," was her reflection, "when he runs down to
Cairo for a Sunday rest. He doesn't want to see anybody or talk to
anybody. I can easily understand that. So he just sits here instead of
going out."

Barbara's explanation was obviously defective at one point. If Duncan
did not care to see people, if he was too weary for conversation, how
came it about that he stayed and talked gently, but constantly, with
her, instead of going to the rooms he had fitted up for himself since
prosperity had come to him? She had heard much of those rooms, of the
multitude of books that he had put into them, of the bric-a-brac with
which he had rendered them homelike and beautiful. They were in fact
very simple rooms, inexpensively furnished. But Duncan had devoted a
good deal of attention and an unfailing good taste to their furnishing
and adornment, and thus, by the expenditure of a very little money he
had managed to create a bachelor apartment which was the talk of the
town.

"He is alone when he goes there," the girl explained to herself, when at
last this question arose in her mind. "And I suppose he feels lonely.
But why doesn't he go somewhere, instead of just sitting here in our
little parlor or out in the porch?"

It was a riddle that she could not read, and for the present, at least,
Duncan would not offer her any help in solving it. He knew now that
Barbara Verne was the woman he loved--the only woman in all the world
who could be to him what a wife must be to a man of his temperament, if
two souls are to be satisfied.

But he saw clearly that Barbara Verne had no thought of that kind in her
mind--or, at least, no such conscio