ur by myself, if it's on a barn-door or the
wall of a mosque--as long as I am by myself."

"Good Lord!" said the man inwardly, as he patted his daughter's arm;
then, aloud. "As it happens, Golliwog darling, I had a letter from
_Marraine_ yesterday, asking me to let you go out to her in Cairo for
the winter and see as much as possible of the ordinary sights. We'll
talk it over with Mother to-morrow."

"Oh, Dads--how wonderful! And can't you and Mother come? And oh!
_can_ I take Wellington?"

"I think so, dear, if he hasn't hydrophobia," and the man bent to pat
the head of the great dog which had crept from under the bed at the
sound of his name.

And later Dads stood at his window, smoking two last pipes, whilst a
glimpse into the future was allowed him.

"Can it be--can it possibly be," he said, puffing clouds of smoke into
the creeper, to the annoyance of many insects, "Big Ben Kelham?--and
the estates run alongside. Wonder if Teresa has noticed anything.
And--by Jove!--of course!--he's at Heliopolis, getting over his hunting
accident. I wonder------"

And Damaris sat at her window, with her arms round the dog, who longed
inordinately for his mat.

"The desert," she whispered. "The pyramids--the
bazaar--life--adventure. How _wonderful_!" There came a long, long
pause, and then she added, as she turned towards a coloured picture of
the Sphinx upon the wall, "And who cares if the nail is a tin-tack or a
screw?"

As it happened, it was destined to be the jewel-hilted, double-edged,
unsheathed dagger of love.

And Fate, having mislaid her glasses, worked her shuttle at hazard in
and out of that picture of intricate pattern called Life, and having
tangled and knotted together the crimson thread of passion, the golden
thread of youth and the honest brown of a deep, undemonstrative love,
she left the disentanglement of the muddle in the hands of Olivia,
Duchess of Longacres.

Her Grace was over eighty.

Of a line of yeomen ancestors ranging back down the centuries to the
William Carew who had fought for Harold, she had been, about sixty-five
years ago, the belle of Devon. Against the warnings of her heart and
to the delight of her friends and family, she had married the Duke of
Longacres, whose roving eye had been arrested by her beauty at a meet
of the Devon and Somerset, and his equally roving heart temporarily
captured by the indifference of her demeanour towards his autocratic
self.

She had lo