r than her own,
and hers were, so she thought, her strongest asset--and say, "Poor
girl! You are a little overtired"; or she would say, "You have so much
to make you happy, dear, and I have so little. Don't be unkind--I only
long for sympathy."

Millicent's moments of self-pity were mean and contemptible and yet
they were effective.

The only thing to do was to leave the two alone, to trust Michael and
go about her business.

Presently she heard Michael say: "Well, I'll leave you to rest until
lunch-time--I can't idle while Freddy is working like a nigger. You'll
be all right, I know, with your book and a cigarette."

Margaret slipped round to the back of the hut; she did not want to
speak to Michael; she was thankful that he had left Mrs. Mervill, but
his voice had been too kind, too nice. Meg did not know what she would
have liked him to do, what he could have done otherwise. She only knew
that the niceness of his voice annoyed her.

When the overseer's whistle for the workmen to "down picks and spades"
sounded and the time was ripe for Freddy to appear, Margaret sauntered
off to meet him. When she saw him coming she hurried towards him. How
she loved him!

When they met she said, "That cat Mrs. Mervill is here. Oh, Freddy, I
hate her!"

Freddy laughed. Millicent Mervill, with her extreme modernity and
virile passions, was so far removed from the thought of the tomb, from
the brown mummy, whose golden ribbons he had been examining; his
sister's annoyance was so utterly unlike her mood of the earlier
morning! He had never seen Meg so moved as she had been in the tomb.
He felt a little relieved that a very human and irritating influence
had suddenly thrust itself across her path. Meg was getting too
enthralled in Egypt. These thoughts flashed through his mind.

"Good old Meg," he said tenderly. "The fighting Lampton's roused, is
it?"

"Yes," Meg said. "I am roused. She's so insolent, Freddy."

"What?" he said, stopping her before she got further. "Insolent? to
whom?"

"To . . ." Meg hesitated. "To life," she said abruptly. "She says
things that I could hit her for saying. Freddy, do squash her!--she
suggests something nasty with every word she utters."

"I'll try and flirt with her--won't that do?"

"No, don't, Freddy!" Fear clutched at Meg's heart; the woman in her
trembled for her brother. Millicent was so fair, so tempting; Freddy
was young and, Meg thought, ignorant of the wil