long start, in hopes that they might be ready to come back by the time
we arrived?"

"Oh, well," she said, "that will make it very late, won't it, and we
may miss Aunt Clara? Anyhow, lots of other creatures just as bad as
yours will be there, for we can't engage the desert like a private
sitting-room."

That settled it. I dashed downstairs and sorted out my charges. They
had got themselves up in all kinds of costumes, for this "act." One man
had on a folding opera-hat, which he had thought just the right thing
for Egypt, as it was so easy to pack! Girls in evening dress; men young
and old in helmets and straw hats, ancient maidens, and fat married
ladies, in dust cloaks or ball gowns, climbed or leaped or scrambled
onto camels, with shrieks of joy or moans of horror: or else they
tumbled onto donkeys which bounded away before the riders were well on
their backs. And men, women, and animals were shouting, giggling,
groaning, gabbling, snarling, and squeaking; an extraordinary
procession to pay honour to the Pyramids and the lonely Sphinx.

We of the roof-party considered ourselves, figuratively speaking, above
camels, far above donkeys, and scornful of motor-cars, in which it was
irreverent to charge up to the Great Pyramid as if to the door of a
cafe. We walked, and Monny still lent herself to me; but she no longer
bubbled over with delight at everything. A subdued mood was upon her,
and her eyes looked sad, even anxious, in the translucent light which
was not so much like earthly moonlight as the beginning of sunrise in
some far, magic dreamland. She had the pathetic air of a spoiled child
who begins suddenly, if only vaguely, to realize that it cannot have
everything it wants in the world. And she merely smiled when I told her