During the third period he slept.

When he awoke, late in the morning, and descended from a cold tub to a breakfast room from which McLean had long since departed, he brought yet another mood with him, a mood of dark, deep disgust and a shamed inclination to dismiss these events very speedily from memory.  For that shadowy and rather shady affair he had abandoned the merry and delightful Jinny Jeffries and got himself involved now in the duty of explanations and peacemaking.

What in the world was he going to say?

He meditated a note—­but he hated a lie on paper.  It looked so thunderingly black and white.  Besides, he could not think of any.  “Dear Jinny—­Awfully sorry I was called away.”

No, that wouldn’t do.  He could take refuge in no such vagueness.  Unfortunately, he and Jinny were on such terms of old intimacy that a certain explicitness of detail was expected.

“Dear Jinny—­I had to leave last night and take a girl home—­”

No, she would ask about the girl.  Jinny had a propensity for locating people.  It wouldn’t do.

His masculine instinct for saying the least possible in a matter with a woman, and his ripening experience which taught him to leave no mystery to awaken suspicion, wrestled with the affair for some time and then retired from the field.

He compromised by telephoning Jinny briefly—­and Jinny was equally as brief and twice as cool and cryptic—­and promising to take her out to tea.

He reflected that if he took her to tea he would really have to stay over another night, for it would be too late to regain his desert camp.  But the circumstances seemed to call for some social amend....  And no matter how many nights he stayed he certainly was not going to lurk about that lane, outside garden doors!

He must have been mad, stark, staring, March-hatter mad!

* * * * *

That morning, during its remainder, he concluded his buying of supplies and saw to their shipment upon the boat that left upon the following morning.  That noon he lunched with an assistant curator of the Cairo museum who found him a good listener.

That afternoon he escorted Jinny Jeffries and her uncle and aunt, the Josiah Pendletons, to tea upon the little island in the Cairo park, where white-robed Arabs brought them tea over the tiny bridge and violins played behind the shrubbery and white swans glided upon the blue lake, and then he carried them off in a victoria to view the sunset from the Citadel heights.

Not a word about the dance—­except a general affirmative to Mrs. Pendleton’s question if he had enjoyed himself.  The Pendletons had not stayed to look on for long, and Jinny had apparently not worn her bleeding heart upon her sleeve.

But this immunity could not last.  He could not hug the protecting Pendletons to him forever.