ve said, the man himself, naked save for a vest twisted round
his waist, sat upon the mound gesticulating violently, whilst keeping
up a one-sided, unanswered conversation with the figure on the sand.
His bronzed face, burnt almost black even in the few hours of sun
beating down upon his unshaded head, turned restlessly to the right and
left; his long fingers plucked without ceasing at the great blisters
which the heat drew up upon his body, bursting them, so that the fluid
mingled with the sand blown upon him by the light wind, and upon which
flies, thousands of them, settled, to buzz away when he rose to run
this way and that in an effort to stay the awful irritation.

Two o'clock by the clocks in Cairo, the hour when workers and idlers,
rich and poor, seek the coolest spot in their vicinity in which to lay
them down and sleep a while--the hour when Mary Bingham drove up to
Shepherds, having raced here, there, and everywhere during the morning
in a vain endeavour to awaken a little interest in the minds of those
who listened, and shrugged, and looked at each other significantly, at
the tale of a man who had got lost in Cairo for a night and a
morning--a tale told agitatedly by a charming woman who could give no
reason for her agitation.

Also she had tried, desperately hard, with the aid of the hotel porter,
to make head or tail out of the narrative as recounted by the hirer of
camels--a woebegone tale in which the undercurrent was a dismal
foreboding as to the fate of the priceless quadruped; the fate of an
Englishman seemingly being of small account when compared to that of
the snarling, unpleasant brute who represented the native's entire
fortune--at least so he said. "Yes, the nobleman had hired the camel
as he so often did, and being acquainted with the ways of the animal
had gone alone as he always did. No! upon the beard of his grandfather
he had no idea in which direction he had gone, though verily upon the
outskirts of Cairo there had been a festival in which La Belle, the
well-known dancer, was to dance--who knows------" And the Hon. Mary
had flung out of the place in disgust, knowing with a woman's
intuition, sharpened love, in comparison with which a _kukri_ is blunt,
that no such place hid the man she had been searching for so
desperately ever since she had suddenly wakened and sprung out of her
bed the night before, for no reason whatever, and, having rung up
Shepherds and ascertained the fact that S