She was absolutely heart-whole, with a firm belief in the “lion” rumour, and later, long after the end of this story, became the jolly, popular wife of the great eye-specialist to whom she had rushed when, after a soul-shaking scene with her step-sisters, she had missed the target entirely at Bisley.

As it happened, the duchess had written, but in a moment of most unusual aberration had put Khartoum on the envelope instead of Assouan, so that it was months, long after the end of this story, that the letter reached him.  Strange is it how the lives of men are wrecked or made through the most trivial happenings.

The grain of dust in the eye; the mudbank in the river; the hen in the road!  Just think of the outcome of such insignificant incidents.

The last letter he had received had been written in Heliopolis on the eve of her grace’s sudden decision; the one that had gone astray had been mailed in Luxor, and had contained the request that, when he had shot the lion he would take the carcase or the skin as a present to Damaris at the Winter Palace Hotel and wait there until her return from the Oasis of Khargegh.

There was no doubt about the fact that he was genuinely in love.

Lion or no lion in the vicinity, he would sit dreaming for hours amongst the rock tombs at full noon or fall of evening or by the light of the sickle-moon; a perfectly absurd proceeding where big game is concerned.  Food or sleep meant nothing to him, so that his usual good-temper was sharpened and his undoubted good looks enchanced by a certain romantic gauntness under the cheek-bone.  People seemed as ghosts to him, so absorbed was he in his love and his pain; so that his act of rising when Mrs. Sidmouth took what she thought to be a diplomatic departure was purely mechanical.

Then Sybil laughed, a jolly, ringing laugh, and laid her hand upon his arm.

“Why don’t you run up to Heliopolis?”

“By jove, Sybil, that’s an idea.  You come along, too.  Damaris would love to meet you; you’re just her sort.  Besides, there’s nothing doing in lion here, it’s only a yarn.  Let’s pack to-night and get off to-morrow.  I’ll go and see if we can get a private steamer—­can’t stick a public one, stopping every other minute to look at tombs!”

Sybil laughed.

“We’ll go, Ben, it will be ripping.  But to-morrow!  How exactly like a man!”

Ben was contrite.  He thought Sybil travelled with a kit-bag and her guns; he had forgotten Mamma.

Mamma protested.  She was an invalid, with all an invalid’s paraphernalia.

They started after the passing of a week in which Mrs. Sidmouth had a series of nerve-storms, and in which Sybil, to pass the time, wrote a four-page letter to Ellen Thistleton, which she duly received at breakfast.

They certainly did not stop en route to look at temples or tombs, but they made quite a long halt on the sandbank just above Luxor, onto which boats of all sizes and shapes so often run.  The loss of time is irritating enough, goodness knows, in ordinary travelling and occurs quite frequently, but when one is love-driven and this maddening delay happens, then you have to make as big an exercise of self-control as when you rush onto the platform only to see the guard’s van of your train disappearing into the tunnel.