Sardonically his eyes sought Ryder.

“So that was your mummy!”

“There was nothing else to do.”  Ryder had withdrawn his arm; the two men faced each other across the girl.  “I was in a blue funk—­you see, I was hiding her in the inner chamber until I could smuggle her away.  And when those wolves came on the scent, and not an instant to lose—­I got the bandages off the real mummy and about Aimee....  Lord, it was a close call!”

He drew a long breath.  “I hadn’t a gun.  I hadn’t a thing—­and I had to grin and play it through ...  And I was deathly afraid of Thatcher.”

“Thatcher?”

“Yes, Thatcher.  You see I’d popped the mummy into a case without its bandages and if Thatcher had glimpsed that he’d have said something—­Oh, innocently—­that would have given the show away.  He knew there was only one mummy and it was wrapped.  But the Lord was with me.  The men opened the empty case first and at the second they said nothing to show it wasn’t empty and Thatcher didn’t look in.  Then they went on to the third.”

“And me—­when I heard those voices—­I stopped breathing,” said the girl.  “But I shook so—­I thought they would think that mummy was coming to life!  And the dust—­Oh, it was almost beyond my force not to sneeze—­”

“You’d have sneezed us to Kingdom Come,” said Ryder, gayly now.

“But I did not,” she protested.  “I lay there and thought of Hamdi looking down upon me, and my flesh crept....  Oh, it was terrible!  And yet it was funny.”

Funny....  McLean gazed in sardonic astonishment upon the two young creatures with such misguided humor that they found something funny in this appalling business.  Flying from palaces ... hiding in tombs ... taking a mummy’s place beneath the dusty bandages of the dead ...  Funny....

And yet there was laughter in their young eyes when they looked at each other and a curve of astounding amusement in their lips.

It touched McLean to wonder.  It touched him—­queerly—­to an odd and aching pain.  For he saw suddenly that he was looking upon something deathless and imperishable, yet fragile and fleeting as the breath of time....

They were so young, so absorbed, so oblivious....

He had forgotten Jinny Jeffries.  So too,—­not for the first time, alas!—­had Ryder.  Now her clear voice from the doorway made them start.

“You might present me, Jack.”

Ryder turned, so did the girl in the painted case, and her eyes widened with a startled surprise.  The doorway had not been within her vision.

Jinny was leaning back against the door, her hand behind her on the knob she was to guard, her figure still rigid with astonishment.

“I didn’t know you—­you dug them up—­alive,” she said with a quiver of uncertain humor.

“My dear Jinny, I had for—­Miss Jeffries, let me present you to Mademoiselle Delcasse,” said Jack gravely.  “I know that you met her the day of her reception—­”