he were watching a play from a great distance without
opera-glasses, while Michael had very powerful ones. He could see
things beyond their horizon; he was in touch with people who inhabited
a world to which they could not travel.

Too often Michael's thoughts were divided from hers by continents of
space. She was often alone. She longed passionately to say to him
that she really believed in all that he believed in. Her beautiful
honesty did not permit it. Her limitations tormented her. It was like
having a cork leg in a race. If she could only get rid of her Lampton,
materialistic, common-sense nature, she would be more able to advise
and counsel her lover. Poor Meg! Thoughts like these had fought for
coherence all night.

She little knew that her nature was the perfect adjustment which
Michael's needed. He came to her, not only as a lover, but as a tired
traveller in search of rest. Her reasoning mind and cautious nature
gave him balance. When he had been standing on his head for too many
hours together, Meg put him on his feet again.

This morning Meg needed putting on her own feet. She was hopelessly
tormented with questions which she could not answer. One minute
Michael's whole scheme ought to be discouraged; his belief in the
occult was a thing to be suppressed; it was dangerous and unhealthy.
The next, she found herself with energies vitalized and glowing over
the certainty that there must be truth in the idea, that there must be
some meaning in the repeated messages conveyed either by dreams or by
whatsoever one chose to call them. Thoughts certainly had been
conveyed to him.

Then the glowing vision of Michael actually discovering the lost
treasure of Akhnaton would vanish and she would see him, just as
clearly, alone and ill in the desert, in lack of funds and abandoned by
his men. She knew his casual methods of making practical arrangements
and his total disregard for his personal health and safety.

She was watching the coming dawn while her thoughts were creating
misfortunes and calling up unhappy visions of Michael alone in the
desert. The old man at el-Azhar had spoken of temptations and
sickness. If the treasure was a fact, then the sickness and temptation
were facts also. But what were the temptations? Did he allude to the
spiritual or the material man?

Suddenly her thoughts were obliterated, her self-inflicted suffering
wiped out. She had no thoughts, no consciousness; for