Only in that moment did Jinny place the haunting recollection.

“But she was burned—­she was killed,” she protested, shaken now with excitement.

“She was not burned—­although there was a fire.  The man who called himself her husband pretended she was killed in order to save his pride.  For she escaped from him.  And he tried to get her back, setting another man, a false father, after her with lying witnesses—­Oh, it’s a long story!—­so I had to hide her in this case.”

“But Jack, you—­why were you hiding her—?  Did you get her out?” stammered Jinny.

“The night of that reception.  You see, I knew she was truly a French girl who had been stolen by Tewfick Pasha and brought up as his daughter—­Oh, that’s a long story, too!  But at McLean’s I had happened on the agents who were searching for her from her aunt in France, and so I knew....  And at the reception when I found she hated that marriage I stayed behind and—­and managed to get her away,”—­thus lightly did Ryder indicate the dangers of that night!—­“so she could escape to France.”

“Oh—­France!” said Jinny.

She could be forgiven for the tone.  She had been kept shamefully in the dark, misled, ignored....  She had been a catspaw, a bystander.

Not that she cared.  Not that she would let them think for a minute that she cared....

But as for this talk of France—­

Her eyes met the eyes of the girl in the mummy case.  And Jinny found herself looking, not at the interloper, the enchantress, but at a very young, frightened girl, lost in a strange world, but resolved upon courage.  She saw more than the men could see.  She saw the loveliness, the helplessness, and she saw too the sensitive dignity, the delicate, defensive spirit....

Really, she was a child.

And to have gone through so much, dared such danger....  She remembered that dark, forbidding palace, the guarded doors, the hideous blacks—­and that bright, smiling figure in its misty veil....  And now that little figure sat in its strange hiding place, confronting her with a lost child’s eyes....

Into Jinny’s bright gray eyes came a mist of tears.  She was queerly moved.  It was a mingled emotion, but if some drops for her own disconcertment were mingled with the warm prompting of pity, her compassion was none the less true.

“I’ll be so glad to do anything I can to help,” she said impulsively.  “If you have no friends to trust in Cairo—­”

“I have no friends to trust—­beyond this room,” said the girl.

“Then I’ll take you to the hotel with me.  You can register as one of our party and keep your room till we leave—­we are going in four days now.  And, oh, I know!  You can cross on the same steamer with us to Europe, for there’s a woman at the hotel who wants to give up her transportation and go on to the Holy Land—­she was moaning about it only this noon.  It would all fit in beautifully.”