t the
girl felt it would have been a mercy to add the last straw and be
done with it. After it bobbed what was apparently an animated load
of hay, so completely were this other camel's legs hidden by his
smothering burden.

Then the car shot impatiently forward, passing a dog cart full of
fair-haired English children, the youngest clasped in the arms of a
dark-skinned nurse, and behind the cart ran an indefatigable _sais_,
bare-legged and sinewy, his red headdress and gold-embroidered
jacket and blue bloomers flashing in the sun. On the sidewalk a
party of American tourists were capitulating to a post-card vender,
and ahead of them a victoria load of German sightseers careened
around the corner in the charge of a determined dragoman.

Arlee smiled in happy superiority over these mere outsiders. _She_
was not going about the beaten track, peeping at mosques and tombs
and bazaars and windows; she was penetrating into the real life of
this fascinating city, getting behind the grills and veils to
glimpse the inner secrets.

She thought, with a deepening of the sparkle in her blue eyes and a
defiant lifting of the pointed chin, of a certain sandy-haired young
Englishman and how wrong and reasonless and narrow and jealous were
his strictures upon her politeness to young Turks, and she thought
with a sense of vindicated pride of how thoroughly that nice young
man who had managed to introduce himself last night had endorsed her
views. Americans understood. And then her thoughts lingered about
Billy and she caught herself wondering just how much he did mean
about coming up the Nile again. For upon happening to meet Billy
that morning--Billy had devoted two hours and a half to the accident
of that happening!--he had joyously mentioned that he was trying to
buy out another man's berth upon that boat. It wasn't so much his
wanting to come that was droll--teasing sprites of girls with
peach-blossom prettiness are not unwonted to the thunder of pursuing
feet--but the frank and cheery way he had of announcing it. Not many
men had the courage of their desires. Not any men that little Miss
Arlee had yet met had the frankness of such courage. And because all
women love the adventurous spirit and are woefully disappointed in
its masculine manifestations, she felt a gay little eagerness which
she would have refused to own. It would be rather fun to see more of
him--on the Nile--while Robert Falconer was sulking away in Cairo.
And then