But he waited while he heard the gate closed.  Still he waited while he heard her locking it.  And then for all his hot young pride, he turned back and knocked upon it.  He called softly.  He whispered entreaties.

Not a sound.  Not an answer.

In a revulsion of feeling he turned and made his way blindly from the lane.

She had heard his voice.  Like a creature utterly spent, she had been leaning against the great gate from which she had withdrawn the key.  But she uttered not a breath in answer, and after she had heard his footsteps die away she turned slowly back and groped among the rose roots for the key’s hiding place.

Mechanically she smoothed it over and moved on towards the house.  All was quiet there.  That sound had been no alarm.  Unobserved she slipped within the little door, and up the spiral steps.

She had not seen the dark eyes that were watching her, from the other side of the rose thicket.  After the girl had gained the house, the old woman came forward and stooped before the marked bush, muttering under her breath at the thorns.  After a few moments she gave a little grunt of satisfaction and her exploring hand drew out the key.

Smoothing again the rifled hiding place among the roses, she made her careful way into the house.

CHAPTER VI

A SECRET OF THE SANDS

The siesta was past.  The sun was tilting towards the west and shadows were beginning to jut out across the blazing sands.

Over the mounds of rubbish the bearers had resumed their slow procession, a picturesque frieze of tattered, indigo-robed, ebony figures, baskets on heads, against a cloudless cobalt sky, and again the hot air was invaded with the monotonous rise and fall of their labor chant.

A man with a short, pointed red beard and an academic face beneath a pith helmet was stooping over the siftings from those baskets, intent upon the stream of sand through the wire screens.  Patiently he discarded the unending pebbles, discovering at rare intervals some lost bead, some splinter of old sycamore wood, some fragment of pottery in which a Ptolemy had sipped his wine—­or a kitchen wench had soaked her lentils.

Beyond the man were traces of the native camp, a burnt-out fire, a roll of rags, a tattered shelter cloth stuck on two tottering sticks, and distributed indiscriminatingly were a tethered goat, a white donkey with motionless, drooping ears, and a few supercilious camels.

The camp was in the center of a broken line of foothills on the desert’s edge.  North and south and west the wide sands swept out to meet the sky, and to the east, shutting out the Nile valley, the hills reared their red rock from the yellow drift.

Among the jutting rock in the foreground yawned dark mouths that were the entrances of the discovered tombs, and within one of these tombs was another white man.  He was conducting his own siftings in high solitude, a lean, bronzed young man, with dark hair and eyes and, at the present moment, an unexhilarated expression.