er noticed before about girls, the wave of bright hair against a
flushed cheek, the dimples in a rounded arm, the slim grace of
crossed ankles and silver-slippered feet.

"And you live all alone in that big house?" Jinny was murmuring.

"Not exactly alone." McLean smiled. "There's Mohammed and Hassan and
Abdullah and Alewa and Saord-el-Tawahi--"

"What _do_ you call him when you are in a hurry?" laughed the girl.

It was a tremendously pleasant evening. He had expected constraint
and secret embarrassment and he had discovered this delightful
interest and bright vivacity.

And if beneath that interest and vivacity something lay forever
stilled and chilled in Miss Jeffries' breast--like a poor hidden
corpse beneath bright roses--why at two and twenty expectancies
flourish so gayly that one lone bud is not long missed. And chagrin
is sometimes a salutary transient shower, and self-confidence is all
the more delicate for a dimming cloud.

Moreover McLean's unconscious absorption was balm and blessing.

When in startled realization of time and place he rose at last and
she murmured laughing, "And after all you never met Aunt and Uncle!"
he felt a queer blush tingle his cheek bones and a daring impulse
shape the thought aloud that in that case he must come again.

"We're here five days more," said Jinny, the explicit.

Thoughtfully he repeated, "Five days," and said farewell.

"Now if he decorously waits to the next to the last day--!" murmured
Jinny to herself, her opinion of the Scots race hanging in the
balance.

He didn't. But it was not the initiative of the Scots race which
brought him to her, late that very next afternoon, but a soiled
looking note which he held crumpled in his hand.

He found her at tea upon the veranda with her aunt and uncle and
while he made conversation with the Pendletons he gave Miss Jeffries
the note.

"From our friend Ryder," he said with forced lightness. "It explains
itself."

But it certainly did not. It was a hasty scrawl to McLean, saying
that Ryder was on his way with the museum finds and sending this
ahead by runner, and that McLean must positively be at the Cairo
Museum to meet him at five and would he please stop on the way and
call at his hotel upon a Miss Jeffries and borrow a woman's cloak
and hat and veil, or if she wasn't in, get them elsewhere.

"What is it--another masquerade?" said Jinny blankly.

McLean looked mutely at her and shook his head, but within h