e, which seems like a
dream." Meg gave a little shiver as she visualized her old-world
Suffolk home and the narrowness of her life there. "Any old place
would do, chum, to bury myself in if my heart was broken."

CHAPTER XIII

Through a labyrinth of narrow streets, echoing with native cries and
Oriental traffic, a wonderful sight and sensation to strangers
unfamiliar with Cairene commercial life, Margaret Lampton found her way
to "the home of enchantment," as she afterwards called the Iretons'
ancient mansion. It was a native house, typical and expressive of the
most resplendent years of the Mameluke rule in Egypt.

A licensed guide, with a brass-lettered number on his arm, in a blue
cotton jebba and a scarlet fez, had volunteered to show her the way; it
would have been impossible for a stranger to find it alone. The
Cairene licensed guides, although they are pests, have their uses.

As Margaret passed under the lintel of the outer door, which led into a
quiet courtyard, of Hadassah Ireton's house, a Nubian servant rose from
the stone _mastaba_--the guards' seat--upon which he had been lying
half asleep; he conducted her with the silence of a shadow to the gate
of the inner or women's courtyard. This courtyard was overlooked by
the women's quarters of the house only.

Margaret rather timidly entered the second courtyard. She scarcely
knew what to expect. She was certainly not prepared for the vision of
beauty which she saw directly the door was opened. She had heard
nothing at all of the fantastic beauty of the superb old Mameluke
palaces in Cairo; she did not know that the Iretons lived in one.

A fat servant, also a Nubian, but more amply clad the guard at the
outer door, rose from a wooden seat, grown grey with age. With the
same silence and mystery he conducted Margaret across the courtyard.

Margaret could, of course, only glance at the bewildering beauty of her
mediaeval surroundings as she followed the servant, but brief as her
vision of it was, it left a never-to-be-forgotten picture in her mind.
A vision of coolness and peace, of oriel windows--chamber-windows for
unreal people, jealously screened with weather-bleached _meshrahiyeh_
work--and one high balcony, the special feature of the courtyard, a
dream of romantic beauty, shaded by the dark leaves of an ancient
lebbek tree. It was a vision as dignified as it was touching. It was
like a lost piece of a world which had passed away, a lo