“I wonder,” said Billy, “if I met a nice Turkish lady, whether she would get me an invitation?  Then we could have another waltz——­”

“There aren’t any Turkish ladies there,” uttered Miss Beecher rebukingly.  “Don’t you know that?  When they are on the Continent—­those that are ever taken there—­they may go to dances and things, but here they can’t, although some of them are just as modern as you or I, I’ve heard, and lots more educated.”

“You speak,” he protested, “from a superficial acquaintance with my academic accomplishments.”

“Are you so very—­proficient?”

“I was—­I am Phi Beta Kappa,” he sadly confessed.

Her laugh rippled out.  “You don’t look it,” she cheered.

“Oh, no, I don’t look it,” he complacently agreed.  “That’s the lamp in the gloom.  But I am.  I couldn’t help it.  I was curious about things and I studied about them and faculties pressed honors upon me.  I am even here upon a semi-learned errand.  I wanted to have a look at the diggings a friend of mine is making at Thebes and several looks at the dam at Assouan, for I am by way of being an engineer myself—­a beginning engineer.”

“You have been up the Nile, then?”

“Yes, I’m just back.  Now I’m going to see something of Cairo before I leave.”

“We start up the Nile day after to-morrow,” said she.

“The day after—­” he stopped.

’Twas ever thus.  Fate never did one good turn but she sneaked back and jabbed him unawares.  She was a tricksy jade.

“That’s—­that’s gloomy luck,” said Billy, and felt outraged.  “Why, how about that Khedive ball thing?”

“Oh, that’s when we come back.”

She was coming back, then.  Hope lifted her head.

“When will that be?”

“In three weeks.  It takes about three weeks to go up to the first cataract and back, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, by boat,” he said, adding hopefully, “but lots of people like the express trains better.  They—­they don’t keep you so long on the way.”

“Oh, I hate trains,” said she cheerfully.

Three weeks ...  Ruefully he surveyed the desolation.  “I ought to be gone by then,” he muttered.

A trifle startled, the girl looked up at him.  As he was not looking at her, but staring moodily into what was then black vacancy, her look lingered and deepened.  She saw a most bronzed and hardy looking young man, tall and broad-shouldered, with gray eyes, wide apart under straight black brows, and black hair brushed straight back from a wide forehead.  She saw a rugged nose, a likeable mouth, and an abrupt and aggressive chin, saved somehow from grimness by a deep cleft in the blunt end of it....  She thought he was a very stirring looking young man.  Undoubtedly he was a very sudden young man—­if he meant one bit of what he intimated.

Feminine-wise, she mocked.

“What a calamity!”

“Yes, for me,” said Billy squarely.  “You know it’s—­it’s awfully jolly to meet a girl from home out here!”