A RASH PROMISE


He didn't want to go. He loathed the very thought of it. Every
flinching nerve in him protested.

A masked ball--a masked ball at a Cairo hotel! Grimacing through
peep-holes, self-conscious advances, flirtations ending in giggles!
Tourists as nuns, tourists as Turks, tourists as God-knows-what, all
preening and peacocking!

Unhappily he gazed upon the girl who was proposing this horror as a
bright delight. She was a very engaging girl--that was the mischief
of it. She stood smiling there in the bright, Egyptian sunshine, gay
confidence in her gray eyes. He hated to shatter that confidence.

And he had done little enough for her during her stay in Cairo. One
tea at the Gezireh Palace Hotel, one trip to the Sultan al Hassan
Mosque, one excursion through the bazaars--not exactly an orgy of
entertainment for a girl from home!

He had evaded climbing the Pyramids and fled from the ostrich farm.
He had withheld from inviting her to the camp on the edge of the
Libyan desert where he was excavating, although her party had shown
unmistakable signs of a willingness to be diverted from the beaten
path of its travel.

And he was not calling on her now. He had come to Cairo for supplies
and she had encountered him by chance upon a corner of the crowded
Mograby, and there promptly she had invited him to to-night's ball.