rt of thing."

"If you wish it." Michael's voice was reproachful.

"Do be honest--you know I'm boring you. You have lots of friends here,
and I can get partners."

"Things do seem to have taken a wrong turn," he said, "but it was not
of my willing." Inwardly he cursed the hour he had ever come. She
would never believe that it had been to see her in her evening-dress
and to enjoy the rapture of dancing with her.

"We are neither of us much good at pretending," Margaret said. "But
never mind--better luck next time! And we had some lovely dances in
the early part of the evening."

Her words, without meaning it, implied that before she had been
introduced to Mrs. Mervill, they had been happy. They had risen at
Margaret's instigation from their table and were wending their way out
of the supper-room. Michael was drifting towards the wide balcony,
towards the fresh cool air of the river.

"No," Meg said determinedly, "not there." A vision of Mrs. Mervill,
pink and fair and seductive, had risen before her, the rose-leaf
creature with the hard eyes, who had so abruptly broken her sympathy
with Michael.

Michael, without speaking, quickly turned the other way. He let her
through the big entrance to the front door of the hotel. The view was
ugly and uninteresting, like the surroundings of any huge Western
public offices or government buildings. The glory of the hotel was the
view from the balcony, overlooking the Nile, and its superb interior
decorations.

"The old trade-route to Nubia lies back there," Michael said,
indicating the desert, which lay out of sight at the back of the hotel.

"The old route to 'golden-treasured Nubia'?" Margaret said. "Fancy, so
close to this fashionable hotel--who would ever dream it!"

"The caravan-route to Nubia--the Kush of the Bible--an immortal road.
To me the word Nubia is full of suggestion."

There was something so distant in the tone of Michael's voice as he
spoke, that Margaret found little pleasure in hearing what he had to
tell her. How delightful he could have been upon such a subject as the
old trade-route to Nubia she knew only too well, so well that she was
not going to let herself be hurt by his aloof way of mentioning it.

"Egypt to-night," she said, "for me means a big ball and gay dresses.
I have lost the other sense of Egypt." She turned up her eyes to the
heavens. "Except for the heavens," she said, "I really might have been
at the Carlton Hotel i