Then with a beaten but ironic smile he stood aside.

Slowly the men lifted the lid....  In that moment McLean became aware that his heart was pumping thickly somewhere in his throat and that the rest of him was a hollow, horrible void of suspense.

Hamdi Bey turned his arrogant stare from young Ryder and looked down....  Drawing closer, fearfully McLean’s eyes followed him.

He could not believe their evidence.  His heart could not stop its idiotic pumping.

But there he saw no terror-stricken girl, no pallid runaway of the harems, but a still, dark-shrouded form, swathed in the tight bandages of the ancient embalmer, a dry, dusty little mummy creature blankly and inscrutably confronting this unforeseen resurrection.

Over their dumbfounded heads he heard young Ryder’s mocking laugh.

CHAPTER XXV

IN CAIRO

“It’s good news!” said Miss Jeffries with bright positives.

It was her response to Andrew McLean’s greeting that evening.  He had made rather a tardy appearance at the hotel, for there had been an important dinner with an important bank official passing through Cairo to escape from, but he arrived at last, looking extraordinarily well in his very best dinner clothes.

And Miss Jeffries, for all her harassment of suspense, was no woeful object in a vivacious blue evening frock with silvery gleams.

“He’s safe—­absolutely safe,” McLean confirmed.

He expected radiance.  Miss Jeffries’ expression was arrested judgment.

“Safe—­where?”

“At his camp ...  I just returned—­just in time to dine.  I motored out this morning.”

“Oh!...  It took your whole day.  I am so sorry!” For a moment the girl appeared to concentrate her sympathetic interest upon McLean.

“You must simply hate me,” she told him repentantly, dropping into one of the chairs in the drawing-room corner she had long been guarding.  “Do sit down and tell me all the horrid details....—­Uncle and Aunt are in the Lounge, and I should like you to meet them, but they’ll be there forever and I do want to hear first....  Was it fearfully hot?”

“Oh, rather,” murmured the young man, confused by this change of interest.  “I mean, that’s quite the usual thing, isn’t it, for deserts?  I got up a good breeze going, for I was a bit wrought up, you know—­not a soul in Cairo had seen Jack since that day.”

“And he was out at his camp,” said Jinny thoughtfully.  “How—­how long had he been there?”

“He says he started that night,” said McLean non-committally.

“Oh!...  That night....  That was rather sudden, wasn’t it?”

“Jack’s sudden, you know,” mentioned his friend uncomfortably.  “And he had a lot of finds to pack up for transport—­they are taking their stuff to the museum and Jack had been away so long, here in the city—­”