c little blisters on her lips.

"I'm--all right." The blue eyes looked suddenly up at him with a
clear smile. "I'm--just resting."

"And now you'll eat a bit?"

Obediently she took the sandwich he made for her, and lifted her
head to drink the cup of tea.

"I'm a--nuisance," she murmured.

"You're a _brick_!" he gave back, with muffled intensity. "You're a
perfect brick!"

Then he backed hastily out of her presence, for fear his stumbling
tongue would betray him--or his clumsy, longing hands--or his
foolish eyes. He felt choking with the tenderness he must not
express. He ached with his Big Brother pity for her, and with his
longing for her, which wasn't in the least Big Brotherly, and with
all the queer, bewildering jumble of emotion that she had power to
wake in him.

Very silently he returned to Burroughs, and when he had made a
trifle of a toilet and eaten far from a trifle of lunch, the two
young men stretched themselves out in the shade, just beyond the
entrance of the tomb, conversing in low tones, while around them the
labor song of Burroughs' workmen rose and fell in unvarying
monotony, as from a nearby hole they carried out baskets of sand
upon their heads and poured the contents upon the heap where the
patient sifters were at work.

Burroughs talked of his work, the only subject of which he was
capable of long and sustained conversation. He dilated upon a rare
find of some blue-green tiles of the time of King Tjeser, a third
dynasty monarch, and a mummy case of one of the court of King Pepi,
of the sixth dynasty, "about 3300 B.C.," he translated for
Billy, and then suddenly he saw that Billy's eyes were absent and
Billy's pipe was out.

In sudden silence he knocked out the ashes from his own pipe and
slowly refilled it. "Congratulations," he ejaculated, and at Billy's
slow stare he jerked his head back toward the tomb. "I say,
congratulations, old man."

"Oh!" Billy became ludicrously occupied with the dead pipe.

"Nothing doing," he returned decidedly.

"No? ... I thought----"

"You sounded as if you had been thinking. Don't do it again."

"And also I had been remembering," said Burroughs, with caustic
emphasis, "knowing that in the past wherever youth and beauty was
concerned----"

So successfully had that past been sponged from Billy's concentrated
heart, so utterly had other youth and beauty ceased to exist for
him, that he greeted the reminder with belligerent unwelcome.

"I tell