s.

For a moment she stood on the roof watching the clouds of twittering
birds as they flew in the direction of the Libyan Hills, and then she
slipped quietly down the stairway, leaving her friends, supremely
oblivious of her presence or absence, weaving their love-tale on the
roof of the ruined temple of love.

With nerves a-jangle and heart disturbed Jill longed for shadows and
solitude, so that she shrank back, hesitated, and then advanced slowly
towards the veiled figure of a woman standing watching her from the
shadows of the very heart of the ruins, the holy of holies, the hall of
past mysteries and solemn rites.

"What wouldst thou?" Jill asked her in Arabic, which was as wellnigh
perfect as any European can make it, and although she could hardly make
out one whole sentence of what she took for a dialect spoken by the
woman, she grasped enough to understand that the Egyptian, draped in
the peasant's cloak, was anxious to read her fortune in the sand she
carried in the black handkerchief, and which sand she said she had
gathered on the steps of the temple's high altar at the full moon.

Jill sat down on a fallen block of masonry, looking very fragile, very
sweet, very fair, with her white throat gleaming above the white silk
blouse and jersey, soft blue hat pulled over her sunny head to shade
her face, death-white save for the shadows which seemed to make a mask
about her eyes, as she drew hieroglyphics on her own account in the
sand with the tip of her small white shoe.

She had heard of the extraordinary powers possessed by some of the
Egyptian people; Hahmed had told her of their gift of reading the
future in the sand; among her own household she had come across
authentic cases where the most unlikely things predicted had come to
pass.

And the cloud about her was so thick, and weighed so heavily upon her!
Of her own free-will she had flung her happiness away, and with her
happiness had gone her content and light-heartedness. She laughed with
others, and cried softly by herself at night; she shared the amusements
with others, and sat up at night, bewildered and afraid, to steal to
the mirror and look upon a pinched face with tightened nostrils, and to
wipe away the dampness gathered under the golden curls.

Had her marriage been a mistake or not? If not, why had she fled
before the first little sign of storm? If it had been, why was she
utterly miserable now that liberty was hers?

Her friends woul