ould touch again at Luxor for the next Friday night.
There seemed to be talk of a masked ball....

Billy leaned suddenly across the table.

"You have forgotten it's the best of the moon to-night?" he asked.
"You must let me take you to see it on Karnak."

Falconer gave him a very blank look.

"We've already planned for that," said he.

"We'll all go," cried Arlee, with instant pleasantness. "We mustn't
miss it for anything."

"You haven't seen the moon on the temple yet?" Billy inquired of
Lady Claire in the pause that ensued.

"Only once--four nights ago. But it wasn't full then."

Billy remembered that moon acutely. It had lighted two fugitives
across a waste of sand. He saw a little figure swaying rhythmically
high upon a camel, a quaint, old-world figure in misty white, with a
shimmering silver veil--like Rebecca coming across the desert, he
thought oddly. Then he looked up and saw a most modern figure in
white across the table, nibbling a cress sandwich, and laughing at
some jest of the Englishman's....

With a start he realized that Lady Claire was waiting for an answer.

"I beg your pardon. You asked----?"

"If _you_ had seen the temple in moonlight, Mr. Hill."

"Not Karnak--only Luxor--night before last."

"Only Luxor!" The girl beside him laughed. "How spoiled you are, Mr.
Hill! _Only_ Luxor!"

It came to Billy, with the force of revelation, that it was going to
be _only_ a great many things for him after this.... Those wild days
in the desert had seen to that, with devastating completeness....
Girls were only other girls--and delight in them a lost word. This
charming one beside him, with the friendly eyes where a faint shadow
of wistfulness underlay the surface brightness, was only Lady
Claire....

He wondered if he was going on like this forever. He wondered if he
was everlastingly to carry this memory about with him, like a
bullet.... Suddenly he felt enraged at himself, at his dumb pain and
useless longings, and with a stanch semblance of animation he flung
himself into the flow of talk which this pretty English girl was so
ready to offer him.

CHAPTER XXII

UPON THE PYLON

Two miles of Sphinxes in the moonlight--a double row of them on each
side of the way from the temple of Luxor--and then a towering pylon
overhead. Karnak was reached.

Out of the victoria jumped two young men in evening clothes, one
sandy-haired with a slight moustache, the other black-haired and
clean