y her eyes sparkled up at him over
the black veil that made her a mystery. "Enjoy the present,
monsieur!"

"Are you enjoying it?"

Her lashes dropped, like black butterflies. She was a changeling of
a girl, veering from gayety to shyness.... Her gaze was now on her
wrist watch, a slender blaze of platinum and diamonds.

"The present--yes," she said in a muffled little voice.

He bent his head to hear her through the veil.

A tormenting curiosity was assailing him. It had become not enough
to know that she was young and slender, with enchanting eyes and a
teasing spirit of wit.... Vaguely he had thought her to be French,
one of the quaint _jeunes filles_ so rarely taken traveling.

But who was she? A child at her first ball? But what in the world
was she doing, back in the palms, away from her chaperon?

He realized, even in the cloud of his fascination, that French
_jeunes filles_ are not wonted to lurk about palms at a ball.

Was she a little Cinderella, then, slipping among the guests? Some
poor companion, stealing in for fun?... She was too young. And there
was that watch, that glitter of diamonds upon her wrist.

"Have you just come to Cairo?"

She shook her head. "For some time--I have been here."

"Up the Nile yet?"

"The Nile--no, monsieur."

"But you are going?"

"That--that I do not know. Sometime, perhaps."

She sounded guarded.... He hurried into revelations.

"I am staying not far from Cairo, myself. I am an excavator--on an
expedition from an American museum."

"Ah, you dig?"

"Well, not personally.... But the expedition digs.... We've had some
bully finds."

"And you came from America--to dig in the sands?" The black domino
laughed softly. "For how long, monsieur?"

"This is my second year."

Still laughing, she shook her shrouded little head at him. "But I
cannot understand! What wonderful thing do you hope to find--what
buried secret--?"

"Nothing half as wonderful as to know who you are," he said boldly.

"That, too, is--is buried, monsieur!"

"But not beyond discovery," he told her very gayly and confidently,
and danced the music out.

As the last strains died, they paused for an instant as if the spell
still bound them, then his arms fell slowly away, and he heard the
girl draw a quick, startled breath. Her eyes sped to that tiny,
blazing watch; when she lifted them he thought he surprised a gleam
of panic.

"How fast is an hour!" she said with an excited little lau