hese events very speedily from
memory. For that shadowy and rather shady affair he had abandoned
the merry and delightful Jinny Jeffries and got himself involved now
in the duty of explanations and peacemaking.

What in the world was he going to say?

He meditated a note--but he hated a lie on paper. It looked so
thunderingly black and white. Besides, he could not think of any.
"Dear Jinny--Awfully sorry I was called away."

No, that wouldn't do. He could take refuge in no such vagueness.
Unfortunately, he and Jinny were on such terms of old intimacy that
a certain explicitness of detail was expected.

"Dear Jinny--I had to leave last night and take a girl home--"

No, she would ask about the girl. Jinny had a propensity for
locating people. It wouldn't do.

His masculine instinct for saying the least possible in a matter
with a woman, and his ripening experience which taught him to leave
no mystery to awaken suspicion, wrestled with the affair for some
time and then retired from the field.

He compromised by telephoning Jinny briefly--and Jinny was equally
as brief and twice as cool and cryptic--and promising to take her
out to tea.

He reflected that if he took her to tea he would really have to stay
over another night, for it would be too late to regain his desert
camp. But the circumstances seemed to call for some social amend....
And no matter how many nights he stayed he certainly was not going
to lurk about that lane, outside garden doors!

He must have been mad, stark, staring, March-hatter mad!

* * * * *

That morning, during its remainder, he concluded his buying of
supplies and saw to their shipment upon the boat that left upon the
following morning. That noon he lunched with an assistant curator of
the Cairo museum who found him a good listener.

That afternoon he escorted Jinny Jeffries and her uncle and aunt,
the Josiah Pendletons, to tea upon the little island in the Cairo
park, where white-robed Arabs brought them tea over the tiny bridge
and violins played behind the shrubbery and white swans glided upon
the blue lake, and then he carried them off in a victoria to view
the sunset from the Citadel heights.

Not a word about the dance--except a general affirmative to Mrs.
Pendleton's question if he had enjoyed himself. The Pendletons had
not stayed to look on for long, and Jinny had apparently not worn
her bleeding heart upon her sleeve.

But this immunit