he had missed the
target entirely at Bisley.
As it happened, the duchess had written, but in a moment of most
unusual aberration had put Khartoum on the envelope instead of Assouan,
so that it was months, long after the end of this story, that the
letter reached him. Strange is it how the lives of men are wrecked or
made through the most trivial happenings.
The grain of dust in the eye; the mudbank in the river; the hen in the
road! Just think of the outcome of such insignificant incidents.
The last letter he had received had been written in Heliopolis on the
eve of her grace's sudden decision; the one that had gone astray had
been mailed in Luxor, and had contained the request that, when he had
shot the lion he would take the carcase or the skin as a present to
Damaris at the Winter Palace Hotel and wait there until her return from
the Oasis of Khargegh.
There was no doubt about the fact that he was genuinely in love.
Lion or no lion in the vicinity, he would sit dreaming for hours
amongst the rock tombs at full noon or fall of evening or by the light
of the sickle-moon; a perfectly absurd proceeding where big game is
concerned. Food or sleep meant nothing to him, so that his usual
good-temper was sharpened and his undoubted good looks enchanced by a
certain romantic gauntness under the cheek-bone. People seemed as
ghosts to him, so absorbed was he in his love and his pain; so that his
act of rising when Mrs. Sidmouth took what she thought to be a
diplomatic departure was purely mechanical.
Then Sybil laughed, a jolly, ringing laugh, and laid her hand upon his
arm.
"Why don't you run up to Heliopolis?"
"By jove, Sybil, that's an idea. You come along, too. Damaris would
love to meet you; you're just her sort. Besides, there's nothing doing
in lion here, it's only a yarn. Let's pack to-night and get off
to-morrow. I'll go and see if we can get a private steamer--can't
stick a public one, stopping every other minute to look at tombs!"
Sybil laughed.
"We'll go, Ben, it will be ripping. But to-morrow! How exactly like a
man!"
Ben was contrite. He thought Sybil travelled with a kit-bag and her
guns; he had forgotten Mamma.
Mamma protested. She was an invalid, with all an invalid's
paraphernalia.
They started after the passing of a week in which Mrs. Sidmouth had a
series of nerve-storms, and in which Sybil, to pass the time, wrote a
four-page letter to Ellen Thistleton, which she d
|