wonder. It touched him--queerly--to an odd and
aching pain. For he saw suddenly that he was looking upon something
deathless and imperishable, yet fragile and fleeting as the breath
of time....

They were so young, so absorbed, so oblivious....

He had forgotten Jinny Jeffries. So too,--not for the first time,
alas!--had Ryder. Now her clear voice from the doorway made them
start.

"You might present me, Jack."

Ryder turned, so did the girl in the painted case, and her eyes
widened with a startled surprise. The doorway had not been within
her vision.

Jinny was leaning back against the door, her hand behind her on the
knob she was to guard, her figure still rigid with astonishment.

"I didn't know you--you dug them up--alive," she said with a quiver
of uncertain humor.

"My dear Jinny, I had for--Miss Jeffries, let me present you to
Mademoiselle Delcasse," said Jack gravely. "I know that you met her
the day of her reception--"

Only in that moment did Jinny place the haunting recollection.

"But she was burned--she was killed," she protested, shaken now with
excitement.

"She was not burned--although there was a fire. The man who called
himself her husband pretended she was killed in order to save his
pride. For she escaped from him. And he tried to get her back,
setting another man, a false father, after her with lying
witnesses--Oh, it's a long story!--so I had to hide her in this
case."

"But Jack, you--why were _you_ hiding her--? Did you get her out?"
stammered Jinny.

"The night of that reception. You see, I knew she was truly a French
girl who had been stolen by Tewfick Pasha and brought up as his
daughter--Oh, that's a long story, too! But at McLean's I had
happened on the agents who were searching for her from her aunt in
France, and so I knew.... And at the reception when I found she
hated that marriage I stayed behind and--and managed to get her
away,"--thus lightly did Ryder indicate the dangers of that
night!--"so she could escape to France."

"Oh--France!" said Jinny.

She could be forgiven for the tone. She had been kept shamefully in
the dark, misled, ignored.... She had been a catspaw, a bystander.

Not that she cared. Not that she would let them think for a minute
that she cared....

But as for this talk of France--

Her eyes met the eyes of the girl in the mummy case. And Jinny found
herself looking, not at the interloper, the enchantress, but at a
very young, frightened gi