A tormenting curiosity was assailing him.  It had become not enough to know that she was young and slender, with enchanting eyes and a teasing spirit of wit....  Vaguely he had thought her to be French, one of the quaint jeunes filles so rarely taken traveling.

But who was she?  A child at her first ball?  But what in the world was she doing, back in the palms, away from her chaperon?

He realized, even in the cloud of his fascination, that French jeunes filles are not wonted to lurk about palms at a ball.

Was she a little Cinderella, then, slipping among the guests?  Some poor companion, stealing in for fun?...  She was too young.  And there was that watch, that glitter of diamonds upon her wrist.

“Have you just come to Cairo?”

She shook her head.  “For some time—­I have been here.”

“Up the Nile yet?”

“The Nile—­no, monsieur.”

“But you are going?”

“That—­that I do not know.  Sometime, perhaps.”

She sounded guarded....  He hurried into revelations.

“I am staying not far from Cairo, myself.  I am an excavator—­on an expedition from an American museum.”

“Ah, you dig?”

“Well, not personally....  But the expedition digs....  We’ve had some bully finds.”

“And you came from America—­to dig in the sands?” The black domino laughed softly.  “For how long, monsieur?”

“This is my second year.”

Still laughing, she shook her shrouded little head at him.  “But I cannot understand!  What wonderful thing do you hope to find—­what buried secret—?”

“Nothing half as wonderful as to know who you are,” he said boldly.

“That, too, is—­is buried, monsieur!”

“But not beyond discovery,” he told her very gayly and confidently, and danced the music out.

As the last strains died, they paused for an instant as if the spell still bound them, then his arms fell slowly away, and he heard the girl draw a quick, startled breath.  Her eyes sped to that tiny, blazing watch; when she lifted them he thought he surprised a gleam of panic.

“How fast is an hour!” she said with an excited little laugh.  “Time is a—­a very sudden thing!”

Sudden, indeed!  How long since he had been a badly bored, impatient young man, mocking the follies of the masquerade?  How long since he had danced with Jinny, flouting her notion of this sort of thing as life?  How long since he had looked into a pair of dark disquieting eyes ... listened to a gay little voice....

Many important things in life happen suddenly.  Juliet happened very suddenly to Romeo.  Romeo happened as suddenly to Juliet.

But Jack Ryder was not remembering anything about Romeo and Juliet.  He was watching that glance steal to the wrist watch again.

Then, as if with a determination of the spirit, they smiled up at him.