Luxor was warm and drowsy with afternoon sun. Motionless the fronds of the tall palms along the water front; motionless the columns of the temple reflected in the blue Nile. Even the almost continuous commotion of the landing stage was stilled.

The two big Nile steamers, of rival lines, lay quietly at rest, emptied of their tourists, and on the embankment the dragomans, the donkey boys, the innumerable venders, were lounging in the shade at dominoes or dice.

In the big white hotels facing the river many drawn blinds spoke of napping travelers, and in the shade of the garden of the Grand other travelers were whiling away the listless inertia of the hour before tea.

"I suppose it\'s quite too early?" murmured a girl at one of the tables, in the shade of a big acacia. Her companion, fussing with a pastel sketch, answered absently, without looking up, "Oh, quite," and then with a note of brisker attention, "I thought we were waiting for Robert?"

"Do you think he\'ll be back? It\'s such a trip to the Tombs of the Kings, you know!"

"To be sure he\'ll be back!" Miss Falconer spoke with asperity. "And why he wanted to go over it again—it\'s odd you didn\'t care to go, too, Claire," she added, most inconsequently. "It was such an excellent opportunity—and you had already spoken of wishing to go again."

"But not so exhaustively. They are doing the entire programme. I only wanted some particular things."

"You could have done them."

"And it was hot."

"It must have been just as hot in the bazaars with Mr. Hill."

"Was it?"

This was purposeful vagueness and Miss Falconer\'s crayon snapped. She made a sound of annoyance, then began gathering her sketching things tidily together. Presently, "He\'s rather an agreeable person, that young American, after all," she cannily observed.

"Why, after all?" Lady Claire was implacably aloof.

"Well, first impressions, you know——"

"My first impressions of Mr. Hill were very delightful." The English girl laughed softly, her eyes full of reminiscent amusement. "He was a deus ex machina to me—I quite jumped at him, I assure you!"

"You don\'t have to assure me!" was the elder lady\'s unspoken comment. She had been in a state of chronic irritation, ever since that Friday noon when Billy B. Hill\'s tall figure had appeared in the hotel dining room. And hurrying Claire away from the conversation he was promptly evoking, she had encountered Arlee Beecher and the Evershams streaming with the other passengers from their boat to see the temple of Luxor, a wonderfully gay and excited Arlee, so radiant in the happiness of her own safe world again that she was bright gladness incarnate.... Instantly Robert had reverted to his alarming infatuation ... and Lady Claire had most shamelessly welcomed the American. It was all unspeakably annoying....

Aloud Miss Falconer observed, "I wonder what brought Mr. Hill back to the Nile."

"I wonder," said Lady Claire pleasantly. "But it makes it very nice for us, doesn\'t it?" she continued amiably. "He knows quite everything about temples."

"And particularly nice for Miss Beecher—though I can\'t say she is treating him very well. However, that may be their way. \'Romance apart from results,\' was, I believe, his phrase."

Lady Claire was silent. But not overlong. "You really think——?" she suggested tranquilly.

"He came on the same train."

"Coincidence. He mentioned he did not see her in the train till Balliana."

"Umph!" Miss Falconer drew out of her bag the especial knitting which she reserved for the Sabbath, and her fingers flew with expressive spirit. "It\'s scandalous," she said at length. "Girls gadding about the face of the earth—picking up chaperons when they remember them."

"It\'s their way, you know."

"Oh, yes, it\'s their way. And their men seem to like it. Mr. Hill didn\'t seem to consider it even unusual.... But as I said, he\'s hardly a judge," Miss Falconer went on unsparingly. "The man\'s bewitched. He never takes his eyes off her."

"I\'m sure I don\'t blame him." Lady Claire\'s tone was most successfully admiring. "She\'s too wonderful, isn\'t she, with those great blue eyes and that astonishing hair! I\'m sure Robert is bewitched, too!"

"Nonsense!" But Miss Falconer\'s tone was too vigorous, betraying the effort to rout a palpable enemy. "What nonsense!" she repeated. "He\'s civil—naturally—when you haven\'t a moment for him. The boy has pride. Too much." The knitting needles clicked warningly.

"Civil!" The girl\'s low laughter was mocking. "Dear Miss Falconer, you are such an euphuist!"

Miss Falconer looked up, a trifle startled. Her young charge was more than a match for her in irony, but the elder lady did not lack for solid perseverance, and she charged on undeterred.

"Of course the girl\'s pretty—too pretty. And Robert\'s a man—he has eyes in his head and likes to please them. And she knows who he is and draws him on."

"I don\'t think Miss Beecher cares a twopence who Robert is," said Lady Claire honestly. "When I told her he was going to stand for Roxham she answered that she had a very poor opinion of M.P.s—from reading Mrs. Ward. I can\'t quite see what she meant—but as for her drawing him on, a moment ago, dear, you were accusing her of luring Mr. Hill back from Cairo."

"I said he followed. I daresay she lured, too. The second string——"

"Then it\'s quite nice of me, isn\'t it, to carry off her second string to the bazaars and prevent her playing him against Robert!"

Lady Claire laughed mischievously, in a flight of daring so foreign to her usual reticence that Miss Falconer grimly perceived that she was changed indeed. She thought helplessly that it was a great pity that young people couldn\'t be treated as the children they were—smacked and made to do what was best for them.

"And after all this dreadful gossiping how can we face our guests at tea?" the girl continued in mock chiding.

"If they are much later we shall not be facing them at all," the older woman declared. "I shall certainly have my tea at the proper time."

The sight of an Arab servant with a tray of dishes had stirred her to this declaration, and promptly she gave her order. In the middle of it, "I\'m always late!" said a merry voice, and little Miss Beecher and Falconer were standing on the grass beside them.

"This time we had no following engagement," said Miss Falconer, unpleasantly reminiscent of another tea time in Cairo, ten days before, but even with her resentment of this American girl\'s intrusion into her long-cherished plans, she could not prevent the softening of her regard as she gazed upon her.

"You don\'t look as if you had been riding very hard at the Tombs of the Kings," she observed, in reluctant admiration.

"Oh, but we have! We did quite a lot of Tombs—not anything like thoroughly, of course!—and then we rode back early and made ourselves tidy for your tea party," Arlee blithely explained, and Miss Falconer perceived that her brother Robert had returned to the hotel without seeking them out, had arrayed himself in fresh white flannels and returned to the boat to escort Miss Beecher across the road into the hotel garden.

Absently she sighed. Her eyes fell away from the peach-blossom prettiness of Arlee\'s lovely face to the subtle simplicity of her white frock of loosely woven silk, and she wondered if that heavy embroidery meant money—or merely spending money. And then she looked across at Lady Claire, and sighed again for her dream of an aristocratic alliance.

"Mrs. Eversham—?" she thought to inquire.

"They\'re having the vicar—or is it the rector?—to tea. They asked him this morning before your message came," Arlee explained. She did not explain that the vicar, or the rector, had imagined, in accepting, that she, too, was to be of that tea party on the boat and was even now inquiring zealously of her of the Evershams.

"Here\............