t, above all, the wash of that steamer (upon which Damaris had
returned from Denderah) which had re-floated his own craft and sent him
racing full steam ahead for Cairo.

Another hour of the infernal wait on the sandbank, and he would have
transferred himself to one of the scores of small boats and been
ferried across to Luxor, where he would have dined at the Winter Palace
Hotel, whilst waiting to catch the express to Cairo, and perhaps have
seen his beloved in the dining-room, or have heard that she was staying
there.

He was thoroughly irritated as he pondered in his deliberate way as to
the best thing to do.

Should he take the first train back to Luxor, or, as the duchess had
not seen fit to acquaint him as to her movements, should he stay where
he was, write her a letter, or send a telegram and wait for an answer?
Anyway, he was irritated enough to scowl at the commissionaire who was
rating a woman whom he had seen hanging about the street, doubtless
with intent of soliciting a nickel coin from one of the great white
race as he--or she--descended the steps to stroll along the street.

She made a few choice remarks upon the undoubted inclusion of a pig in
the commissionaire's parentage, in a curiously sibilant voice, then
limped away with a distressing swing of her body from the hips.

"Can't you keep those people quiet?" Kelham demanded angrily, as he
moved a chair further back, and lit a cigarette.

An hour had passed, in which he had come to no decision, when Fate, in
the shape of a page-boy, offered him the just-arrived, local morning
paper, which he took and read, with only half a mind upon the gossipy
contents.

"By Jove!" he suddenly exclaimed. "If that isn't a bit of luck!
Here's the very excuse for getting down there without kind of thrusting
myself upon them." He flattened out the paper and again read through
the paragraph which gave a most extraordinarily detailed account of the
immensely wealthy Hugh Carden Ali, his career at Harrow; his travels;
his stables in the desert; his birds and a hundred and one other
details calculated to interest those who like reading about other
people's most intimate affairs. It ended: ". . . Being a great
sportsman, the strange story of lion which is causing such uneasiness
and is likely to do harm to the Luxor season, has taken him to his
Tents of Purple and Gold, one of the wonders of modern Egypt and which
lie in the desert a little distance from the well-k