,
her hands were clasped peacefully on her knee, and she simply radiated
happiness.

Mary and Jack, Lady Bingham, Diana Lytham and Sir Timothy and Lady
Sarah, had started that morning for England in the great liner which
Jill had watched unconcernedly until it disappeared up the canal.

And so for the first time for many weary weeks she was alone, though it
must be confessed that the liberty had only been gained by a deliberate
perversion of the truth.

Fussed by kind-hearted, though, somewhat scandalised Lady Gruntham,
driven to the point of madness by the never-ending stream of wisdom,
advice, and plans which from morning till night flowed unceasingly from
the store of Mary's book-gleaned knowledge, Jill had cleared up the
situation all round by suddenly announcing the imaginative fact that
Hahmed was coming to Cairo to fetch her home. Whereupon Mary Bingham
had arranged everything to her own entire satisfaction in the twinkling
of an eye, told Jack Wetherbourne that she and her mother were leaving
for England if he'd like to come too, had worked her maid to death with
packing, distributing quite a fair supply of backsheesh, and had
bundled her bewildered mother and contented fiance down to Suez, where
Jill had seen them off to the accompaniment of a last final flood of
advice which was mercifully lost in the scream of the siren, the rasp
of machinery, and the manifold sounds which add hilariously, especially
in foreign climes, to the pandemonium that reigns to within a second of
the cry which invites some of us to descend to terra firma on the
occasion of the sailing of a passenger boat.

Jill suddenly came out of a reverie which had painted her cheeks a most
exquisite pink, and caused her teeth to show in the faintest smile.

Then she frowned and shook back her mane of hair, as was her habit when
perplexed, and spoke softly to the night wind which was blowing
straight in at the window from the other side of the canal.

"The oasis is calling me, night wind, calling, calling, and yet I do
not know. You who come from the oasis, tell me, is my beloved there,
or shall I find my dwelling empty, and my happiness but as a
turned-down cup?"

Who can explain what it is that leads the spirit astraying from its
material covering?

Are love and longing its sole companions upon the road of shadows?
Surely no! for is not revenge, or jealousy, or the near approach of
that which is called death as potent to span the stre