a boy at home. Egypt had converted him into a strong
serious scholar. His fair head, bent over his work, with the lamplight
shining on it, was so dear to her that impulsively she put her long
strong fingers on the glittering hair; she longed to kiss it.

"Dear old boy!" she said. "Isn't it all just too exciting? Isn't life
thrilling? Isn't it lovely to be alive?"

Freddy did not look up. "Some girls," he said, "mightn't think this
being very much alive--the sorting out of bits of broken rubbish,
thrown out of a tomb which has been forgotten for two or three thousand
years. Did you ever think you'd care to know whether a prickly pear
was indigenous to Egypt or was not? Or whether canopic jars had their
origin in family grocers' jars being lent by the head of the house to
hold the intestines of some dear-departed?"

Meg laughed. "It is all too odd, but being in it, and actually knowing
that we are going to see into that tomb in a few days and discover who
the king was who was buried there, and all about his personal and
family affairs, and be able to touch the jewels he was buried with,
it's too interesting for words, I think!"

"I hope you won't be disappointed. It may have been robbed."

"But you don't think so?"

"No, I don't--not at present. There was a tomb opened at one of the
camps, not long ago, which told a tragic story of the end of robbery
and plunder. The roof had fallen in while the burglar was busy
unwrapping the cloths from the dead mummy. He was evidently trying to
get at the heart-scarab, I suppose, and at the jewels which the
windings held in their place. He had been smothered, taken in the act.
Probably he had left his fellow-plunderers at the entrance; the roof
may have looked unsafe, but he had hoped to collect all the jewels and
scarabs before it gave way. Fate played him a nasty trick. The roof
caved in, and we have secured all the jewels he had collected together
and have learned a lesson of what must have often happened. The
mummy's body was, of course, still perfect. Of the intruder only bones
were visible and some fragments of his clothes. Things keep for ever
in these hermetically-sealed Egyptian tombs, where neither rust nor
moth ever entered in, but where thieves did break through and steal."

"How thrilling!" Margaret said. "How did you guess that the skeleton
was the skeleton of a robber? I suppose as he never returned, his
friends just went off and left him?"